Personal computing discussed
Deanjo wrote:Guess it really depends on what you want to do with your VM. If you are planning on utilizing for anything that requires the best graphics performance available in a VM, or proper USB passthru implementation then VMware is really your only choice.
Deanjo wrote:As far as Hyper-V and VT-d goes, I guess my question would be to you would be what types of devices are you planning to work with VT-d. My experience has been that there are very few consumer products that play well with it. So unless you are planning to have isolated NICs or controller cards I don't really see any advantage going the Hyper-V route.
bthylafh wrote:I use VirtualBox for Linux guests because it's a lot simpler to install the guest utilities than for VMware (which has to be untarred and run manually), and for archaic Linuxes like Debian 2.2 it has somewhat better-supported emulated hardware.
Flying Fox wrote:If we are talking about "processor and graphics workloads", this is 2013 and I am fairly certain that most of these applications should be multithreaded by now that utilizing VMs for "distributed-ness" is actually worse?
Flying Fox wrote:The 80-90% red kernel overhead suggested that all those VMs that you are running is causing all sorts of context switches either via I/O loads or just the VM processes juggling for CPU attention.
Flying Fox wrote:I have to ask, is this idea of running multiple VMs even a good idea?
Kougar wrote:I submit that soon, the idea of virus scanners/checkers will go away (having been defeated) in favor of disposable VMs that replace today's concept of "browse in incognito mode". With sandboxing, it's starting to be this way already, but soon opening a browser, or any other application, will be the same thing as starting up a VM.but again I'm doing it just for fun.
MarkG509 wrote:I submit that soon, the idea of virus scanners/checkers will go away (having been defeated) in favor of disposable VMs that replace today's concept of "browse in incognito mode". With sandboxing, it's starting to be this way already, but soon opening a browser, or any other application, will be the same thing as starting up a VM.
Efforts like Qubes-OS (qubes-os.org) have started to dance around this idea, but still don't quite go far enough.
Kougar wrote:But otherwise yeah... why not?
MarkG509 wrote:In a word, "benchies". I think we need a benchmark for benchmarks about how well they reflect and affect real-world performance. E.g., most browser benchmarks focus on things like time to open a web page, but really >90% of the time people see/feel in real life is network latency. Personally, I can "feel" 3ms, "see" 10ms, but don't care much about anything less than 100ms for desktop stuff (and right, I don't game (much).)
Kougar wrote:I think there's still room to improve on "hyperthreading" the GPU for handling multiple concurrent programs, to badly misuse the term..
shank15217 wrote:real men use KVM, anything else is amateur hour.
just brew it! wrote:With Linux I routinely move installs back and forth between VMs and real hardware. It's pretty cool to be able to set up a system in a VM, then dump the image to a physical hard drive and boot it natively.
MarkG509 wrote:Popping a digression or two off the stack, I think we're circling around a good point, which is what is the right amount of state to virtualize, and what Virtual Machine Managers can do, or try to do, to help with this. When I first create a VM, it really is throw-away. But after a few days, when I've set it up with all my 'stuff' it starts to become as important to me as the physical machines on which it's running. That tells me I'm doing something wrong by virtualizing the whole thing.
just brew it! wrote:Yeah, the product activation conundrum does place some limits on what you can do with Windows VMs unless you've got a VLK. At least you still have the 30 day window if using a standard retail/OEM key.
NovusBogus wrote:What about moving VMs, will Windows detect the changed motherboard and require re-activation?