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

[Dan Swartzendruber]

On 12/4/2012 11:10 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana) wrote:
>> From: Dan Swartzendruber [mailto:dswartz at druber.com]
>>
>> So I have an OI151a7 box.  Latest vbox is installed with several guests.
>>      
> Make sure you have guest additions installed into each of the guests.
> Make sure you don't give all the CPU's to any single guest.  In my experience, I give each guest half the CPU's.  Then it load balances pretty well...  If I have 8 cores and I'm running 4-8 guests, I give them all 4 cores.  So I am overloading the CPU's, but as long as they're not all assigned to a single guest, they seem to load balance well.
>
> Virtualbox disk performance is poor if you're using vdi.  (IMHO.)  So instead, wrap a raw device (zvol) in vmdk file.  It works much better.
>    
All guests have guest additions.  Nothing special was done for CPU usage 
(default of 1 CPU).  I'm wondering about the vdi vs zvol.   Let me give 
that a try...