VirtualBox 4.2 vs VMware Player 5
13 Jan 2013Yesterday i tested the performance of VirtualBox and i thought it should be nice to see how it compares against the famous VMware. I chose to test the VMware Player instead of the workstation because it is free. The first big difference between VirtualBox and VMware Player was that the Player did not allow more than 4 cpu’s to be assigned.
I was to lazy to retest VirtualBox with 4 cores so i am comparing VMware Player with 4 cores against VirtualBox with 6 cores on the same machine. The settings for VMware are the same as for the VirtualBox.
The results:
| Test | Hardware | VirtualBox(6 cores) | VMware Player(4 cores) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Benchmark [system] | 25364.12 | 7079.97 | 20555.10 |
| NGINX [system] | 30298.94 | 11886.01 | 18968.06 |
| PostgreSQL [system] | 236.85 | 193.23 | 1220.99?? |
| PostMark [disk] | 3571 | 213 | 391 |
| IOzone Write [disk] | 62.10 | 41.22 | 98.91?? |
| IOzone Read [disk] | 4309.98 | 1068.72 | 1083.34 |
| C-Ray [cpu] | 58.72 | 125.20 | 173.29 |
| POV-Ray [cpu] | 959 | 817 | 777 |
| Crafty [cpu] | 96.06 | 0.01?? | 0.01?? |
| PHPBench [system] | 67250 | 43562 | 48452 |
| GraphicsMagick [cpu] | 142 | 89 | 89 |
| OpenSSL [cpu] | 104.13 | 19.20 | 21.27 |
| John The Ripper [cpu] | 5418 | 3684 | 2768 |
| MAFFT [cpu] | 7.69 | 22.35 | 14.75 |
| Himeno [cpu] | 625.87 | 518.17 | 558.65 |
| HMMer [cpu] | 14.34 | 21.58 | 25.25 |
| LAME MP3 Enc | 19.47 | 24.76 | 22.91 |
| FFmpeg [cpu] | 28.70 | 41.94 | 37.01 |
| LZMA Compres [cpu] | 174.19 | 286.20 | 270.72 |
| BZIP2 Compres [cpu] | 10.72 | 15.79 | 21.36 |
| NAS EP.B [cpu] | 152.25 | 110.69 | 78.73 |
| NAS LU.A [cpu] | 7111.38 | 6199.18 | 5145.94 |
| Stream Copy [memory] | 9223.42 | 8976.57 | 9050.65 |
| Stream Scale [memory] | 8870.21 | 8548.39 | 8694.84 |
| Stream Add [memory] | 9717.47 | 9292.04 | 9437.53 |
| Triad [memory] | 9974.82 | 9511.68 | 9626.59 |
Looking at the results i think the conclusion is that VMware Player gives better performance than VirtualBox. Because of the 4 cores in VMware in stead of 6 in VirtualBox it looses almost all of the cpu tests.
VMware player lacks some of the features VirtualBox has but if you don’t need those maybe it is a better choice?