In this series, I’m going to focus on comparing different Virtual Machines running Windows and their performance regarding different tasks such as single-threaded CPU-only applications, multi-threaded programs or even games requiring hardware 3D acceleration.

This article will show you when and for what to use Sun VirtualBox.

For these tests, I used a quite uncommon configuration: I ran a virtual Windows 7 on my native Windows 7. Most users probably won’t do this, but there is a reason why I chose this OS configuration: Sun VirtualBox allows you to use more CPU cores than you actually have.

The OS installation with Virtual Box is quite easy, just insert your install DVD into the real drive, create a new VM with the hardware configuration you like and tell VirtualBox which OS you’re planning to install. Then allocate your DVD to the VM and start the installation. Worked greatly with Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7 and VirtualBox automatically installed its tools to enable automatic mouse grabbing and this kind of stuff.

In contrast to Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox comes with GPU acceleration, but only allows you to use up to 128MB of video memory. Moreover, the drivers are still beta, so the performance is not as good as you would like it to be.

Performance:

For this test, I didn’t choose settings that any serious user would try, but decided to test the option of using 8 cores.

Settings:

CPU count: 8

RAM: 2048MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 128MB video memory

I searched for a benchmarking program that can use any number of threads and found wPrime. Since it can be scaled to 4 or 8 cores, it was capable of running on both my real quad-core and on the virtual octo-core and still using all the cores.

The virtual octo-core was 0.303 seconds slower, which equals 1.9% performance loss. This is quite surprising when you consider that four of the cores are just simulated and the real OS and processor have to split up the work somehow. These results are even better than the ones I got from Microsoft Virtual PC where the performance loss was about 3.9%.

Hardware graphics acceleration should be there, but don’t expect too much. The drivers are still beta, the video memory is just 128MB and the graphics performance of VMs has never been close to the CPU performance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the DirectX acceleration to work, neither on Windows 7 64-bit nor on Windows XP 32-bit. That’s a pity because the only VM supporting graphics acceleration is VMware Player then.

All in all, VirtualBox is a really nice tool due to its possiblities of configuration such as using 8 cores, its easy installation and the CPU performance. There is no such feature as direct integration into the host OS as with Virtual PC, but nobody would expect such a feature, and the graphics power isn’t that awesome either, but still better than other VMs supplying just a standard VGA adapter without hardware acceleration or DirectX support.