[ale] Speeding up VMs

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 9 Jan 2016 14:29:32 -0800
Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:

> I'm playing with VMs on a home Win 7 computer so I can practice using
> the same setup with a work Win 7 computer (the idea being to run Linux
> in the VM for certain tasks).
> 
> Right now I've started using VirtualBox but it seems a bit slower
> than I expected (I know it's going to be slower than bare metal).  Any
> suggestions for improving the speed/efficiency of the VM?

My setup is different from yours, but I'll tell you what I've seen.

Keep in mind that my host is Linux, and my guests are Linux.

Just before leaving Debian Wheezy for Void, I was using Virtualbox. It
was nice, but it frequently aborted without warning or error message
while doing big installs like Gentoo. I switched to Qemu, and it was
rock solid.

My experience with Qemu (and as I remember with Virtualbox) was that
they were noticably faster than bare metal. This is subjective, but I'm
pretty sure true.

I've always made my guest systems as simple as possible.

> 
> The test machine is a Core i7 with 16 GB RAM so I've given the VM 4 GB
> of RAM.  

Yes, that's what I do.

> The installation process for the guest Linux is exceptionally
> slow, though, which is why I suspect I've set something up wrong or
> maybe VirtualBox isn't the best choice?

If it's *exceptionally* slow, I'd start to suspect lack of hardware
acceleration, either because your mobo/processor isn't capable of it,
or because you didn't put the hardware acceleration whatever into
VirtualBox (in Qemu it's -enable-kvm ).
> 
> According to the guest machine properties, VT-x, nested paging and KVM
> Paravirtualization are all enabled.

Ugh! That shoots down that theory.

> For the installation, I'm using this as an experimental platform to
> learn how to install and manage LVM (and some other experiments on
> something that I don't care if I have to wipe).  So I have one virtual
> HDD of 20 GB split into three partitions (/boot, LVM PV, and swap),
> the PV is part of a single VG and there's a single LV on top of that
> VG for root.

Just for fun, why don't you lay down Lubuntu 14.04LTS in a VM, taking
all the defaults, and see if *that's* slow. If not, you can start to
exploit the differences.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
January 2016 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28