[OpenIndiana-discuss] Slow performance of guests in virtualboxon OI?

[Dan Swartzendruber]

Thanks for the suggestions!  #1 and #2 are new to me - I came from ESXi,
where you just set the VMs up and the bridging works automatically.  I had
read old articles for vbox about having to do this by hand, but the new
version seemed to 'just work', so it didn't occur to me there might be
issues there.  No idea on #3.  #4 yes, I did install the extension pack and
guest additions for everyone.  #5 nothing in logs.  I'm pretty sure there is
no memory pressue on the guests - neither one is using more than 1GB of the
2GB assigned when this happens.  It's frustrating, because it is not
horribly slow, just noticeably laggier than under ESXi. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Klimov [mailto:jimklimov at cos.ru] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 7:01 AM
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Slow performance of guests in
virtualboxon OI?

Hi,

   I don't think I've had substantial lags in VBoxes, but it may be a lucky
case of hardware - and that's not only the different layers of
virtualization support in CPUs. In particular, recent list mails suggested
that server-grade NICs with buffers and networking-task offload features
might implement things like CrossBow VNICs with their unique MAC addresses
in hardware rather than with CPU emularion and brute promiscuous mode.
Likewise, I believe it might be possible to find such hardware that would
lag due to HW or (lack of) drivers in illumos, and you might have had bad
luck with that on a particular motherboard.
Thus, you might have better luck with separate NICs, usually those with
e1000g driver pose almost no problems (during OS upgrades, they forget the
Jumbo settings, if those were used, due to overwriting of
/kernel/drv/e1000g.conf).

   To verify that you hit VBox-intrinsic problems rather than something
else, can you:

1) Set up an etherstub on the host and attach VM VNICs to that?
This should rule out any hardware from your networking between VMs and host,
leaving the VM engine performance and limitations.
If this does work for you better than equivalent setup on hardware, you can
organize routing/NAT via the host GZ or a dedicated LZ with exclusive IP
stack attached to this etherstub.

2) You did set up the MAC addressing for bridged VM interfaces properly,
right? (You have a dedicated host VNIC per VM NIC, and the unique MAC
addresses of the two are equal) I did not really work with non-bridged
interfaces (VBox NAT, VBox host-only), so can't comment on performance of
those.

3) Recent VBox might add some optimizations like "memory balooning" and
memory deduplication. I wonder if these happen to you, and if they are
troublemakers or not...

4) Do you use the proprietary extension pack above the GPL VBox software,
and do you add guest additions to your VM's OSes?
Usually, these should help speed up your VM experiences.

5) Look in VBox logs (stored under VMs' folders), to see if the engine
complains about anything unusual that it can't initialize or use, etc.

6) Scroll over VirtualBox under Solaris forum, perhaps ask some questions
there too :)

On another hand, I don't think I've stressed my systems that much.
Basically, for an interactive VM I've only used my laptop in the past few
months, and when there were tests with a dualbooted Win7 (on its dedicated
partition where it could native-boot from too) performance felt acceptable.
It did take slower to boot and halt, that with a native boot, but after I
added RAM (and about 3Gb of the 8Gb available got dedicated to the Windows
VM), performance during work (word processing, browsing) was not really
discernible from that with a native boot with 4GB HW RAM before. Windows is
memory-greedy however, so anything around 2GB lagged even on HW native boots
for Win7 and Vista.

For virtualization purposes, you might also need to provision much swap
space (at least as much as your VMs are configured to use as their vRAM),
and disk performance/cache for the backing stores might matter - though you
do say that is blazing fast.

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