Intel Ivy Bridge Linux Virtualization Performance

As the latest Intel Ivy Bridge numbers to push out, here is a look at the Linux virtualization performance with the Core i7 3770K processor when comparing its raw/bare-metal performance to Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization and Oracle VM VirtualBox under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

This article just provides some basic virtualization numbers for Ivy Bridge on the Intel Core i7 3770K test system that has been extensively benchmarked at Phoronix going on the past two months. These numbers are focusing upon the KVM and VirtualBox performance as found with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64. VMware virtualization was left out of the mix this time due to licensing reasons, but older VMware Linux virtualization results can be found here. Xen virtualization was not tested since the Xen-enabled kernel failed to boot on this hardware.

The bare metal results are when running benchmarks on the host i7-3770K without any form of virtualization. When running KVM via QEMU and virt-manager and then VirtualBox, the virtualization settings were left at their defaults. Each VM had access to 12GB of the 16GB of DDR3 system memory. VirtualBox did have its guest additions installed.