Hosted virtualisation suites: a group test
Published: 22 Jun 2009
Performance
Only VMware Workstation was able to run every one of our hypervisor benchmarks. This speaks volumes for the stability and flexibility of the product.
The results of the tests we performed were:
The key rows are the start-up time and OpenGL score in Cinebench.
VirtualBox and Parallels appear to blitz the competition in the single-CPU test, but all is not as it seems. These two products cannot be configured to restrict the number of cores used, so we suspect that they are both using as many cores as possible to boost performance. This is backed up by the fact that Parallels and VirtualBox appear faster than Wine on a single CPU, which lacks the additional hypervisor and OS overhead, yet Wine smashes their scores on the multiple CPU score: what appears as one CPU to the guest OS may in fact be many processes and/or threads on the host OS. We therefore put more credence into the start-up time as a better reflection of performance.
In general usage, each of these hypervisors feel quick within Windows XP. VirtualBox does stand above the competition though, and is blisteringly quick with OpenGL compared to the other hypervisors.
Cost
The following table summarises the cost of each product (excluding support):
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