VirtualBox vs. Hyper-V for Virtual Workstation on Windows
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Just doing some usability testing on my desktop and attempting to compare VirtualBox 5.0.10 against Hyper-V running on Windows 10 (my main laptop.) I started off with VirtualBox (a type 2 hypervisor) because I had not thought about the fact that Hyper-V (a type 1 hypervisor) was integrated and I need only enable the feature. So I tried both, testing with a Linux Mint 17.2 guest workload which is my main Linux of choice and I like to keep it ready to go at any time.
I was impressed by how well VirtualBox worked when I first tested it. I feel like the VBox 5 family has really made some great strides. You really don't notice the lag of working on a VM.
When I moved to Hyper-V I immediately felt a slow down in using Linux Mint. The desktop was slower and laggy. Also Hyper-V gave me a poorly adjusted, windowed experience that was just poor. VirtualBox smoothly integrated with the guest, with no effort, to have transparent mouse sharing, display detection and fluid movement between screen sizes including an awesome full screen mode that makes it feel like the native OS on the laptop!
In fact, VirtualBox runs so well on Windows 10 that typing this post in Firefox on Linux Mint on VirtualBox on Windows 10 literally works better than typing in Firefox directly on Windows 10!! And by a quite noticeable degree.
So in a quick, first test VirtualBox seems to dramatically outperform Hyper-V vis-a-vis having a responsive secondary virtualized desktop experience on top of or alongside Windows. Hyper-V is, of course, geared towards different use cases so this is not entirely shocking, but given that Hyper-V is pushed for this use case a bit now, I'm still rather surprised. VBox blows it away in this particular case.
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This means I can try VirtualBox on my Win10 partition again... I had to quit using it (one of the reasons I loaded Fedora 22 on my laptop)... VirtualBox 5 did not work well for me at all... I'll give it a shot tonight.
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Cool - I also like the comment about FF on Linux Mint was better than FF on Windows 10.
I'll have to check that out.
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Wow, I'll have to give Vbox another shot.
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@BBigford said:
Wow, I'll have to give Vbox another shot.
Using it right now and boy does Linux Mint run smoothly on here!
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Not surprising. Hyper-V isn't really meant to be used in that way aside from admin tasks once in a while. It's really meant to be used to run servers/services. Not a desktop you access through it's own console.
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@Jason said:
Not surprising. Hyper-V isn't really meant to be used in that way aside from admin tasks once in a while. It's really meant to be used to run servers/services. Not a desktop you access through it's own console.
That's why I am not completely shocked. But since Hyper-V has replaced VirtualPC and is being promoted for this specific use case I am a little surprised that getting it competitive with VirtualBox has not been a priority.
