Intel Core i7 Virtualization Performance

VirtualBox virtualization really was hammered when it came to ray-tracing performance with Bwfirt. VirtualBox was fourteen times slower than KVM and the Ubuntu host.

The VirtualBox ray-tracing beatdown continued with C-Ray. VirtualBox 2.1.4 was 4.2 times slower than the KVM hypervisor in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel.

In our final ray-tracing test, which was POV-Ray, Sun xVM VirtualBox performed about the same as KVM and Ubuntu 9.04.

VirtualBox delivered better disk write performance than KVM. The Ubuntu host wrote a 4GB file at 61MB/s while VirtualBox was at 31MB/s and KVM at 11MB/s.