I've been fiddling around with various virtualization systems, including VMWare, Fusion, Xen, Qemu, KVM and now lately, VirtualBox. To my surprise, there's virtually no (pun intended) difference running it natively on FC9, or under either VM (Ubuntu). It's possible Ubuntu is just "faster" than FC9 since some VM tests were actually faster, so maybe I really ought to run this test with an FC9 VM instead. Also, there's very little, if any, difference between VirtualBox and KVM performance (which is good, because I like VirtualBox a heck of a lot more). I ran the VirtualBox benchmarks both with, and without, VT-x support, VT-x seemed marginally faster, although it's probably not statistically "safe".

Here are the numbers:

The Bonnie++ I/O benchmarks are equally impressive for VirtualBox, most tests are as fast as the host OS (or faster ...).

On top of being very fast, VirtualBox is also the easiest to use free virtualization software I've tried, so far. It even supports PulseAudio as an audio driver! This feature alone makes it very attractive, since my FC9 host system is completely migrated to PulseAudio, and now my virtual machines now seamlessly supports sound as well.

I'll blog more about PulseAudio as I learn more, but it's a really neat little package. I really hope it'll clear up the Audio mess that is currently in Linux/Gnome/KDE. This could be the sound server to control it all.