Topic created on: July 19, 2007 03:44 CDT by NIM .

Vista was slower than it should be under virtualization, almost as if something - a poorly written kernel driver or bug in the scheduler - was dragging the OS down during benchmark testing.

Since my original tests were isolated to virtual machines running atop a Windows Host OS (Vista 64-bit), I decided to shake things up a bit and repeat the scenarios using VMware Workstation 6.0 running on Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn." The results only served to deepen the mystery.

As with Vista under Windows-based VMware, the Vista-on-Ubuntu VM was slower than it should have been. But whereas the former configuration was as much as 50% slower than its equivalent native performance delta � as measured between Windows XP and Vista on bare hardware � indicated it should be, the Vista-on-Ubuntu scenario showed a 93% slower result. In other words, if the delta between XP and Vista running natively is ~2x, and the delta for the same OS configurations under Windows-hosted virtualization is ~2.5x, then the delta under Ubuntu is ~3x.

All things being equal, the deltas between these test scenarios � non-virtualized Windows XP vs. Vista on hardware, virtualized XP vs. virtualized Vista on Windows, and virtualized XP vs. virtualized Vista on Ubuntu � should be identical. However, in each case some mitigating factor is causing Vista to run more slowly, as measured by the completion times for the OfficeBench test script, than I would have expected it to give my experience benchmarking the OS natively. And this factor seems to have an even greater impact when running atop a Linux-derived Host OS.

Frankly, this is the opposite of what I expected when I set out to repeat the tests under "Feisty." I figured that the lower overall footprint of Linux � i.e. the whole �runs well on older systems with limited RAM� claim � would have contributed to a better showing across the board. In fact, the opposite now seems to be the case:

When it comes to the performance of virtualized Windows XP and Vista, Microsoft's newest OS mops the floor with Linux...or at least with the Ubuntu distribution of Debian. Go figure!

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