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Topic on Talk:Virtualization

A note about performance claims

1
Aemony (talkcontribs)

Generally speaking the relative performance overhead of various virtualization techniques are affected by too many factors to sufficiently say that a user can expected the shown performance impact as that ultimately only comes down to that specific system and scenario.

Just to name a few of the factors involved:

  • Underlying physical hardware of the system
  • Thermals/cooling characteristics of the system
  • BIOS/UEFI settings, CPU core/memory frequency settings, hardware-assisted virtualization being enabled, speculative executions (whether they are allowed to engage or not), etc
  • Host operating system (if it involves an underlying Type 1 hypervisor or not)
  • Virtualization solution (if it involves an underlying Type 1 hypervisor, or if its run as a Type 2 hypervisor)
    • This one in particular is complicated as Hyper-V is always a Hype 1 hypervisor, even when installed on a consumer Windows install, and with consumer versions of Windows featuring virtualization based security that relies on Hyper-V it is quite often that a user might have Hyper-V enabled without realizing it and without the feature selected
    • This also means that VMware Workstation 15.5+ as well as VirtualBox 6.0+ (and other newer alternatives) on Windows 10 and 11 runs through the Windows Hypervisor Platform APIs when Hyper-V is being used on the system, which also may have an impact on performance
  • Virtualized hardware/software/application, and its various characteristics in relation to the rest of the system as well as actual physical hardware of the system
  • and so on...

As a result it is all but impossible to properly account for all factors involved that may affect performance, and summarizing it down to a single relative performance table that does not account for most of these factors ends up being wildely misleading for the average reader with barely any insight into the topic.

Ergo, we should strive to keep away from performance figures and claims as much as possible other than in a loose sense (e.g. hardware-assisted virtualization allows for improved performance compared to without them).