Performance
When performing benchmarks of the hypervisors, only VMware Workstation was able to run every test we required. This speaks volumes for the stability and flexibility of the product.
The results of the tests we performed were:
| VMware Workstation | VirtualBox | KVM | Parallels Workstation | Wine | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start-up (sec) | 44.4 | 20.4 | 44.7 | 31.6 | - |
| Cinebench (1 CPU) | 3520 | 14,873 | - | 11,483 | 3810 |
| Cinebench (xCPU) | 6625 | - | - | - | 21,717 |
| Cinebench (OpenGL) | 206 | 1207 | - | - | 7711 |
The key rows to look at are the start-up time and OpenGL score in Cinebench.
VirtualBox and Parallels appear to blitz the competition in the one CPU test, but everything is not as it seems. With those two products unable to be configured to restrict the number of cores used, I suspect that they are both using as many cores as they can in an effort to boost performance. This is backed up by the fact that Parallels and VirtualBox are able to appear faster than Wine on a single CPU, which is without the additional hypervisor and OS overhead, yet Wine smashes their scores on the multiple CPU score — what appears as one CPU to the guest OS may in fact be many processes and/or threads on the host OS. Therefore I put more credence into the start-up time as a better reflection of performance.
In general usage, each of these hypervisors feel quick within Windows XP. VirtualBox does stand above the competition though, and is blisteringly quick with OpenGL compared to the other hypervisors.
Cost
The following table summarises the cost of each product (does not include cost of support):
| VMware Workstation | VirtualBox | KVM | Parallels Workstation | Wine | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost (AU$) | $150 | Free | Free | $67.90 | Free |
