VMware Player vs Virtualbox

[Wathnix]

Hi All,

I just started playing with virtual machine software on my home computers, looks like both VMware Player and Virtualbox are both free for home users, I was wondering which one is better? What kind of performance hit can I expect on the guest OS? is VMware faster than Virtualbox? I've used virtualbox so far and the performance hit seems substantial, but virtualbox seems easy to use, have not tried VMware Player yet... Any other thoughts on virtualization?

Thanks all.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

I believe that VMWare runs better than VirtualBox for an Intel machine.

Any virtual machine will run half as fast as your physical machine if you do a half/half split of your hardware.

 

[Wathnix]

OK, did some benchmarking on VMware and Virtualbox with a intel core2quad 6600 and 4 gigs memory, Vertex 2 180GB SSD

Down and dirty, it looks like VMware wins by a substantial amount on graphics benchmarks, ties with virtualbox on CPU intesive benchmarks and successfully runs more benchmarks than Virtualbox does. Plus VMware's Drag 'n Drop feature works, while VB's does not (unless you use Linux)

:VMware : VirtualBox : Host machine
-------------:--------:-------------:-----------------
PC Mark : 1795 : 930 : 3430
Novabench : 586 : Fail : 961
Passmark : 846 : 499 : 1750
Hyper Pi : 49 : 55 : 25
CPU-M : 9905 : 10373 : 10454
Cinebench CPU: 0.59 : 0.61 : 2.6

Both guests were set to single core and 2GB RAM with a 25GB hard disk space

 

[awktane]

Yeah I had way more luck with VMWare overall. If it's just for a windows vm I also found that hyper-v which comes with the higher versions of windows does pretty well. It is very basic though; you can't pass through devices very easily. CPU, memory, and disk speed was overall a sliver faster on hyper-v over vmware under windows 8. I needed to pass through a video card so I was forced to use vmware.