VirtualBox vs VMware Player vs KVM
13 Jan 2013I was testing the performance of VirtualBox and VMware Player when i thought maybe i should test one of the more bare metal hypervisors like xen, kvm or esxi. Xen needs more config than kvm and esxi is without actual host so i decided to try out kvm because it is the easiest one to setup.
The settings for this test are the same as for VirtualBox.
The results:
| Test | Hardware | VirtualBox(6 cores) | VMware Player(4 cores) | KVM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Benchmark [system] | 25364.12 | 7079.97 | 20555.10 | 21621.75 |
| NGINX [system] | 30298.94 | 11886.01 | 18968.06 | 17577.74 |
| PostgreSQL [system] | 236.85 | 193.23 | 1220.99?? | 151.61 |
| PostMark [disk] | 3571 | 213 | 391 | 156 |
| IOzone Write [disk] | 62.10 | 41.22 | 98.91?? | 73.74?? |
| IOzone Read [disk] | 4309.98 | 1068.72 | 1083.34 | 1174.45 |
| C-Ray [cpu] | 58.72 | 125.20 | 173.29 | 115.67 |
| POV-Ray [cpu] | 959 | 817 | 777 | 756 |
| Crafty [cpu] | 96.06 | 0.01?? | 0.01?? | 0.01?? |
| PHPBench [system] | 67250 | 43562 | 48452 | 49120 |
| GraphicsMagick [cpu] | 142 | 89 | 89 | 100 |
| OpenSSL [cpu] | 104.13 | 19.20 | 21.27 | 21.53 |
| John The Ripper [cpu] | 5418 | 3684 | 2768 | 3996 |
| MAFFT [cpu] | 7.69 | 22.35 | 14.75 | 13.34 |
| Himeno [cpu] | 625.87 | 518.17 | 558.65 | 559.75 |
| HMMer [cpu] | 14.34 | 21.58 | 25.25 | 19.26 |
| LAME MP3 Enc | 19.47 | 24.76 | 22.91 | 22.66 |
| FFmpeg [cpu] | 28.70 | 41.94 | 37.01 | 36.10 |
| LZMA Compres [cpu] | 174.19 | 286.20 | 270.72 | 263.37 |
| BZIP2 Compres [cpu] | 10.72 | 15.79 | 21.36 | 15.89 |
| NAS EP.B [cpu] | 152.25 | 110.69 | 78.73 | 116.16 |
| NAS LU.A [cpu] | 7111.38 | 6199.18 | 5145.94 | 6749.69 |
| Stream Copy [memory] | 9223.42 | 8976.57 | 9050.65 | 7249.76 |
| Stream Scale [memory] | 8870.21 | 8548.39 | 8694.84 | 7101.33 |
| Stream Add [memory] | 9717.47 | 9292.04 | 9437.53 | 8175.45 |
| Triad [memory] | 9974.82 | 9511.68 | 9626.59 | 8248.95 |
Overall KVM gives better performance than VirtualBox and VMware, i find it strange that the memory is the one that is slower. KVM gives better performance when looking at the rough power but when it comes to desktop (graphics) it really is behind the other two. There are options to speed it up but it is still not great. I would say use KVM for headless instances.