Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

In the past, I’ve been working with VMWare Server quite a lot at my company VAlain SA. We use it to run a LAMP development environment so that we can easily cope with growing needs and of course be ready in face of hardware failures. My team of developers at atHome uses Sun’s VirtualBox for their needs.

Using VMWare Server running on top of a Fedora Core , with a Fedora Core guest OS for instance, we often experience serious lag due to i/o wait. Simple operations like rsync’ing files from a remote production box to the local development server, cause i/o wait in excess of 80%, slowing the whole virtual machine down to a crawl. This seems to be a quite common problem, and not dependant on specific hardware or software, as you can find many posts on the Internet when you google for “vmware io load” for instance.

Using SUN’s VirtualBox, the problems went away. I/O load is constantly very low on the same hardware and using the same software setup. Now, this doesn’t mean at all that VirtualBox is better than VMWare, or vice-versa – they are two different beasts. However, in our case, switching to VirtualBox brought a great improvement to what was a headache to us. I’d be glad to share your opinions and experiences!

UPDATE : I found a pretty good performance review comparing MS Virtual PC, SUN’s VirtualBox, and VMWare, over here http://4sysops.com/archives/microsoft-virtual-pc-2007-sp1-vs-sun-xvm-virtualbox-210/