For over 3 years I have been trying to get similar guest performance in 64 bit windows as I have on my i7 870 at work in the tasks I do at work. My requirements are pretty taxing. I need fast CPU, fast disk, 6+ GB guest ram and accelerated opengl all that I need guest SMP with greater than 4 guest cores so that my source code building (>3 million lines of c++ code) and 3D medical image processing has a acceptable level of performance.
I have over these years tried xen, EXSi, vmware player, vwmare server, VirtualBox, kvm. All of these have one issue (performance problem and/or instability) or another. I just upgraded my CPU to a 6 core / 12 threaded i7 970 however that seems to have not helped the situation. vmware player does not support more than 4 guest cores (I want to assign my guest 8 of the 12 threads). VirtualBox 4.1.X supports any number of cores but it does not appear to faster with more than 4 guest cores and it also still randomly locks up the guest. kvm also supports more cores but has very slow video (even with the qxl driver). I did not try xen or ESXi since I want fast host video and do not want to have to use 2 graphics cards to get that.
I am beginning to think what I want is just not possible today and I would be better served with converting the machine to a 64 bit windows machine and dual booting or putting the less taxing linux system as guest on windows virtulization instead.
Does anyone have a good working solution for similar requirements or am I just wasting my time and money with virtulization on problem that can not be solved in 2011?
