G
George Neuner
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
That depends on the comparitive quality of the driver frameworks and
I/O subsystems of the two OSes, and how the virtualization works. If
the client is running a crappy OS (e.g. Windows), and the client is
using network/disk/whatever drivers that are virtualization-aware,
then it's quite possible that I/O intensive apps will experience
noticable accelleration compared to running directly on the hardware.
It also depends on the virtualization software. Obviously mileage may
vary, but I have found VMware to be the most stable, most versatile
(in terms of systems it will run) and best performing on both Windows
and Linux hosts.
VirtualBox runs very well on Linux but on Windows I have found the I/O
to be slow, and I've had occasional unexplained hangups trying to run
Windows clients.
If you are virtualizing Windows on Windows, VirtualPC works very well
.... but I've had trouble trying to run other clients.
I'm always on the lookout for something better, but so far for me
VMware has proven to be the best solution.
The best you can hope for in the case of CPU intensive tasks is to
operate at the same speed as they would directly on the hardware.
Non-privileged code should run at 95+% of the raw CPU speed. You do
take a slight hit with thread scheduling in the client OS because the
context switch involves some privileged operations that have to be
emulated.
George