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I have an Ubuntu server and I'm looking to virtualize Windows at the best possible performance so it's almost near non-virtualized speed.

Is it best to put the image on a separate SSD? I'll have 6GB dedicated to the VM instance.

Also, in terms of performance and speed is VMware better than VirtualBox?

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VMware what? There are numerous products that vary massively in terms of functionality. – Ben Pilbrow Jun 12 '11 at 9:23
looking for recommendations, don't have a massive budget for the entire operation but if there is a version for a couple hundred bucks I'm OK with that – Joe Jun 12 '11 at 9:39
What are you going to do with it? Speed isn't just a clear cut "this is faster than that". What it actually comes down to in my experience is choosing one that works best for your management and monitoring. I don't think any of them are really horribly lacking, so getting bogged down in a 5% performance difference in some subsystem, which may or may not be "fixed" in another release. – Bart Silverstrim Jun 12 '11 at 11:59
If performance is your absolute bottom line need, you probably shouldn't be virtualizing it unless you have an actual need to do so. – Bart Silverstrim Jun 12 '11 at 12:03
It would be nice to know what VMWare product you're on about. Just saying "VMWare" is like telling us you just installed "Microsoft". The better the quality of your question, the better the quality of the answers you will get. – DJ Pon3 Jun 12 '11 at 12:27
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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 14 '11 at 7:15

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1 Answer

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I might have a different view on virtualization the 2 main points why to virtualize are:

  1. Save money by not having to rent DC space, buy hardware, ....
  2. Save time by being able to easily migrate around in case the hardware needs maintenance (no it doesn't help if the hardware breaks before being able to do maintenance - you still need backups)

I've always found that CPU performance isn't the bottleneck these days (usually, there are cases but then why would you do virtualization in such cases - the time is better invested in automating the setup process and have easy migration that way).

Regarding I/O performance I don't think there's a need for SSDs if there are hard budget constraints a dedicated disk might do as well. It's not that expensive and without the host OS touching it you should be somewhere around the lines of non-virtualized performance.

My very subjective recommendation

I'd recommend going with kvm. There are special drivers for virtio that'll give you better performance than the plain Windows drivers. On the other hand kvm isn't certified by most by most commercial software you might run into support trouples, check back with your vendor first before you do any virtualization.

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