Virtualization

VirtualBox has been my main desktop virtualization solution for the past 3-4 years. VirtualBox started out as a kind of weaker version of VMware Workstation, but VirtualBox has really improved (branched snapshots etc.) over the past few years so I really can't complain especially since it has a liberal evaluation license.

VirtualBox is pretty friendly for desktop users, and is a so-called Type 2 hypervisor, so I wondered how it would fare in terms of performance relative to Hyper-V or ESXi. Turns out not too bad.

My performance tests indicated no clear winner in CPU-intensive tasks. Hyper-V sort of won the I/O tests, but I think you could probably get any desired outcome based on how you tweak the tests, so I'd even call that a wash.

So choosing the right virtualization solution for me comes down to usability and cost.

For me, Hyper-V seemed to have an edge in usability. I have no desire to earn a PhD in virtualization, and Hyper-V seems to have wizards and online docs which made things easier for me.

First, let me say that these results should be taken with a grain of salt. These are rather informal tests, and are geared to my environment and my way of working.

Still, I tried to be somewhat rigorous by using the excellent Phoronix Test Suite, and keeping conditions as uniform as possible across the various virtualization environments.

Testing with multiple VMs running concurrently

Initially, I wanted to test under three conditions :

* One VM running alone within the host

In my discussion of my home-based server, setting up an ESXi 5.0 server was one potential solution for my requirements.

I first heard about VMware back in 1998 or 1999 when reading a story about them in the Wall Street Journal (newspaper). I sensed immediately that they were onto something big. Turns out the company has executed well on bringing virtualization into the main stream.

In my discussion of my home-based server, setting up an Ubuntu 12.04 server and using its "native" KVM virtualization technology was one virtualization solution.

Up to this point, I had never tried KVM, although I had dabbled a bit with QEMU which appears to be a part of KVM.

Installation

In my discussion of my home-based server, I wanted to test virtual machine performance in several environments (VirtualBox, KVM, ESXi, Hyper-V).

At first I thought I'd just do some seat-of-the-pants qualitative tests, but then I thought I'd look into using a more rigorous approach.

Without too much research, I uncovered the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS). This seems to be an industrial-strength, free "hardware" benchmarking tool with a long history and many features.

In my discussion of my home-based server, setting up a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V was one potential solution for my requirements.

On the server side, I've mostly used Linux/Ubuntu solutions over the past 5-10 years. But my family still mostly uses Windows clients. Since I need SMB-based backups of the clients, I thought I'd give Windows Server 2008 R2 a try.

I recently purchased an HP ProLiant N40L MicroServer as the basis of a small home network. Basically, I need to be able to backup a few Windows client machines and run 2-3 virtualized Ubuntu servers.

To me, backing up the Windows clients means I need the MicroServer to expose SMB-based shares to the Windows machines. I've been doing this in the past with a D-Link DNS-323 NAS with rsync. It seemed to work fine for me, and I thought I'd continue with that but use the Microserver for the backups as the DNS-323 has more limited size and capability.

I was interested in looking at Node.js as a potential framework for some back-end network services.

I initially thought about installing Node.js on Ubuntu, but then thought about trying it in webOS since webOS has been shipping with Node.js since Oct, 2010.

Getting webOS running in a virtual machine (VM) is easy enough. You'll first need to have Java and VirtualBox installed on your machine.

Then download the webOS 3.0 SDK here :

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/sdk_pdk_download.html