virtualization

Gestão Integrada de Redes e Sistemas“A general-purpose full virtualizer

for x86 hardware, targeted at server,

desktop and embedded use”

Miguel Luís [email protected] / Bruno Faria [email protected] /

Filipe Oliveira [email protected]

Universidade de Aveiro

Summary- About VirtualBox

- Tests

- Test Results

- Conclusion




Characteristics

portabilidade (MacOSX, Linux, Solaris, Windows)32/64bitsX hardware de virtualização

Guest Additions: shared folders(host/guest), hardware-accelerated graphics, seamless windows, guest properties (request properties from a running guest), guest control(start applications inside a VM from the host system; automate software deployment within the guest)

Memory overcommitment: Memory balooning, Page fusion

Great hardware support: guest multiprocessing(SMP) up to 32 CPUs per VM irrespective of how many on the host, USB, hardware compatibility like IDE,SCSI and SATA controllers, virtual network cards, I/O APIC




CharacteristicsFull ACPI support

Multiscreen resolutions

Built-in iSCSI support

PXE Network boot

Multigeneration branched snapshots

Clean architecture; unprecedented modularity: easy to control it from several interfaces at once; GUI/command line control; virtualbox programming interface; SDK

Remote machine display (RDP):plugged directly into the virtualization layer wich means it works on guests other than Windows and do not require application support in the VM




CharacteristicsWinlogon and PAM for RDP authentication

USB over RDP: connect arbitrary USB devices locally to a virtual machine which is running remotely on a VirtualBox RDP server

VirtualBox can import and export virtual machines in the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

Teleportation: move a running virtual machine or application between different physical machines without disconnecting the client or application




Power! Ease-of-Usexoxo*




Scenario & Tests Using Geekbench and two similar hosts , one with Windows and other with Linux both running two VirtualBox VM, we runned several scenario tests where we tryed to see the impact of the Virtualization in both host and guests.

We also tested the impact of creating IO (using Bonnie++) in one guest in both guestsand host performance.




Test results Running a VirtualMachine on a Windows or Linux host won't affect the performance, the results were the same running in the host or in the VM.

Although using the stress mode on the benchmark we noticed the results were a bit lower overall and a bit less running in the VM.




Test results When we ran two VM's on the same host we noticed a decrease of performance specially if we were running some kind of stress or work on one the machines. When we used Bonnie to do some IO weight on the machines we did not noticed a big change on the benchmark but the machine's CPU became really slow.

Equal results were shown on both linux and windows hosts again.




ConclusionsUser friendly: Good GUI interface: it's easy to create and manage the Virtual Machines; Good CLI interface: gives us a more simple use of advanced features;Portability;Compatibility: It's compatible with a lot of hardware, and software

○ It can create and manage virtual disks from other virtualization software. (VMWare, VirtualPC and Parallels)




ConclusionsIt lacks of a solution to manage multiple VMs at the same time.

● There are some third-party applications that try to do it, some of them by creating scripts and using the CLI interface of VirtualBox.

Very bad performances under I/O stress




Final thoughtsIt is a good virtualization solution, to use at home or a small company;

It has a lot of user friendly features, than enhance the user experience;

But it's not advisable for a Datacenter;




virtualization

Technology

bruno faria

filipe oliveira

application miguel lus

parallels miguel lus

thevm miguel lus

io apic miguel lus

embedded use miguel

datacentermiguel lus