Looking for VM related advice

R

Rebel44

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 7, 2006
Messages
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Hi,

My primary rig is used for gaming I am running Win7 64bit, but I would like to boost my production by using Linux in VM. Only problem is that I need some VM program that will allow me to assign 4 cores (8 threads) to it.

Any suggestions?

 
I have used and highly recommend the VM image from linuxforge with Virtualbox. Check it out here
 
For 4 cores/8 threads, VM Player version 3.0 will work also. I'd probably just go with the linuxforge image and VirtualBox as suggested above for simplicity, though.
 
Definitely choose VMware Player 3.0 over Vbox. Vbox supports multiple processors but does not specifically support symmetric multi-processing (aka, SMP). As such, there is a significant amount of inter-core communication inefficiency when attempting to run symmetric processes under Vbox. VMware, on the other had, does support processing symmetry up to eight threads. Hence, your performance under VMware will be noticeably superior to that under Vbox.

Make sure you get 3.0, though. Newer versions of Player have been locked to four threads.
 
I'm pretty sure that Virtualbox has had SMP support since version 3.
 
Anyone with a quad I7 or a 2600K want to do some testing? I assumed that performance would be similar, but I never tested it. I don't think that my army of dual core Athlons will be a very good test for SMP performance.
 
I remember Virtualbox bringing the host to a crawl when folding on my i7-920 with 6GB of RAM. I don't remember what version it was though. As for PPD performance, I have no idea what the difference was. The deal breaker was that VBox pretty much stopped me from doing anything else while VMware played nice and allowed me to do other things other than folding.

I have no performance issues on the host while folding with 24 cores on either of my boxes with the current version of Virtualbox. I would like to see the numbers with an i7 as well.
 
Doozer said:
I'm pretty sure that Virtualbox has had SMP support since version 3.
Click to expand...
Right you are. Apparently, it's been a while since I looked into Vbox's vSMP implementation. Sorry OP, I retract my earlier assertion.
 
vmware's lacks of threads is disturbing. I think I'm a vbox for life guy at this point.
 
When I started F@H in VirtualBox, everything in Win7 was super slooooow, so I instead installed it into Ubuntu (using WMware Workstation). Lag is still noticable in Windows but its tolerable.

So far PPD looks to be up 10% - next week I will post improvement in average PPD.

 
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