How good are Ryzen CPUs for virtual machines?

[MongaPablus]

First things first, this is the first time I post anything at this forum, please excuse me if I'm not posting it in the right place or I'm doing something wrong.

I work as a PLC programmer for industrial machinery and that kind of stuff. I have been trying to configure a new desktop PC for work which would be good handling a ton of stuff at the same time (virtual machines and, mostly, a Siemens program called TIA Portal that takes a lot of CPU and RAM). Just by reading the specs, Ryzen 5 1600 could be just what I'm looking for, but all reviews I can find in YouTube about Ryzen CPUs are only about gaming, video rendering and so on. I'm not sure if Ryzen is optimized for virtualization and the things I need, so I was wondering if anyone here would enlighten me about it.

Thank you in advance.

PS: I know my English is a bit crappy, please don't make fun of me hahaha.

[mrzoltowski]

So when you say virtualisation, what do you mean, Intel's VT-x and VT-d are more feature rich than AMD-V and AMDs IOMMU support, if you are just running something like VirtualBox you shouldn't have issues, if you are running a Xen/HypV/ESX cluster then you do.

 

VM's love more cores/threads, and Ryzen 5 1600 has 6.  So if you are just looking for simple VM's than it should suffice.

[MongaPablus]

Yes, I use VirtualBox to run a Windows 7 Pro virtual machine. Then I shouldn't have any issues with AMD, is that right? I was worried because some people told me to be sure before I purchased it, just in case that stuff wouldn't work properly with Ryzen (given they just released it and it might not be completely optimized).

Thanks a lot.

[KuJoe]

Is there anything specific you want me to test on my Ryzen 7 1700? I've got both VirtualBox and VMware Player installed.

[MongaPablus]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

Is there anything specific you want me to test on my Ryzen 7 1700? I've got both VirtualBox and VMware Player installed.

That would be so nice of you. How does it perform with a Windows 7 VM and some CPU and RAM heavy program?

By the way, how much RAM should I throw into my build? And how fast?

Thank you so much.

[mrzoltowski]

15 minutes ago, MongaPablus said:

Yes, I use VirtualBox to run a Windows 7 Pro virtual machine. Then I shouldn't have any issues with AMD, is that right? I was worried because some people told me to be sure before I purchased it, just in case that stuff wouldn't work properly with Ryzen (given they just released it and it might not be completely optimized).

Thanks a lot.

What is the host operating system? Make sure you run a 64 bit host OS to run a 64bit guest OS, otherwise there is an overhead penalty.

[mrzoltowski]

14 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Is there anything specific you want me to test on my Ryzen 7 1700? I've got both VirtualBox and VMware Player installed.

Aww.. that's mighty nice of you. +10 Charisma

[MongaPablus]

1 minute ago, mrzoltowski said:

What is the host operating system? Make sure you run a 64 bit host OS to run a 64bit guest OS, otherwise there is an overhead penalty.

The host OS is Windows 10 Pro Creators edition 64bit. That wouldn't be a problem.

[mrzoltowski]

Just now, MongaPablus said:

The host OS is Windows 10 Pro Creators edition 64bit. That wouldn't be a problem.

That's cool, was just making sure ... you should be completely fine. AMD-V and intel VT-x although different in detail are similar in principle. 

[MongaPablus]

Awesome guys, thank you so much. I will probably end up with the Ryzen 5 1600 in my build. I was gonna throw an i7-6700 (no K), but this makes the whole PC like 200 Euros cheaper and, on paper, would be even better for what I need.

Thanks again. As I said at the first post, this is the first time for me in this forum and I didn't expect to get such quick answers.

[mrzoltowski]

1 minute ago, MongaPablus said:

Awesome guys, thank you so much. I will probably end up with the Ryzen 5 1600 in my build. I was gonna throw an i7-6700 (no K), but this makes the whole PC like 200 Euros cheaper and, on paper, would be even better for what I need.

Thanks again. As I said at the first post, this is the first time for me in this forum and I didn't expect to get such quick answers.

Awesome, we are usually a helpful bunch around here  Be sure to check out the forums and offer your advice/knowledge to others.

[The Benjamins]

Check out wendell youtube channel level1tech, he mostly deals with VM's and linux and stuff. he may have a video out or will make one some time. 

[KuJoe]

59 minutes ago, MongaPablus said:

That would be so nice of you. How does it perform with a Windows 7 VM and some CPU and RAM heavy program?

By the way, how much RAM should I throw into my build? And how fast?

Thank you so much.

I wasn't sure exactly how to benchmark a VM so I just built a Windows 7 VM (Home Premium since it was the only ISO I had available) in VMware Workstation, gave it access to all 8 cores/16 threads and 8GB of RAM instead of the 16GB I have installed, then ran Cinebench R15 to see how it performed compared to the PC to see if there was an issues and how much overhead there was from the virtualization and the score was less than 200 points different than the score I got on the PC itself which is pretty impressive.

 

I cloned the VM and gave each VM 2 cores and 4GB of RAM and ran Prime95 to max out the CPUs and while they were running in the background I did some normal work for a few minutes on my PC and didn't notice any slowness while doing my normal tasks.

 

Again, I didn't go too in depth with the testing because I don't know the best approach. If you have specific programs you want me to test or any specific tasks you'd like me to run I'd be happy to test them for you, I could even record the tests if that would help anybody else.

 

Let me know, I'm open to requests and would love to find a good way to benchmark VM performance since that's the main reason I upgraded to Ryzen 7. I haven't played with VirtualBox much, I only have it installed because I was getting an error with a Linux distro I was playing with and wanted to rule out the issue was with the virtualization so I haven't touched it since but I'm willing to spin up some VMs on that also if you want me to test some specific features or functionality.

[MongaPablus]

57 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

I wasn't sure exactly how to benchmark a VM so I just built a Windows 7 VM (Home Premium since it was the only ISO I had available) in VMware Workstation, gave it access to all 8 cores/16 threads and 8GB of RAM instead of the 16GB I have installed, then ran Cinebench R15 to see how it performed compared to the PC to see if there was an issues and how much overhead there was from the virtualization and the score was less than 200 points different than the score I got on the PC itself which is pretty impressive.

 

I cloned the VM and gave each VM 2 cores and 4GB of RAM and ran Prime95 to max out the CPUs and while they were running in the background I did some normal work for a few minutes on my PC and didn't notice any slowness while doing my normal tasks.

 

Again, I didn't go too in depth with the testing because I don't know the best approach. If you have specific programs you want me to test or any specific tasks you'd like me to run I'd be happy to test them for you, I could even record the tests if that would help anybody else.

 

Let me know, I'm open to requests and would love to find a good way to benchmark VM performance since that's the main reason I upgraded to Ryzen 7. I haven't played with VirtualBox much, I only have it installed because I was getting an error with a Linux distro I was playing with and wanted to rule out the issue was with the virtualization so I haven't touched it since but I'm willing to spin up some VMs on that also if you want me to test some specific features or functionality.

Thank you so much. I think that's enough, I already made up my mind, I'm getting the Ryzen 5 1600 and 16 gigs of ddr4 2400mhz RAM.

[The Benjamins]

2 hours ago, KuJoe said:

WORDS

I would be interested in 4 VM's (2 cores a piece) and run cinebench on all at the same time. see what the scores are and their deltas.

[KuJoe]

7 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

I would be interested in 4 VM's (2 cores a piece) and run cinebench on all at the same time. see what the scores are and their deltas.

I've kicked them off but it looks like the 5400 RPM HDD they're running on isn't handling 4 Windows 7 VMs well, I'll throw another SSD in there tonight and post my results tonight.

[Solocamper]

15 hours ago, KuJoe said:

Is there anything specific you want me to test on my Ryzen 7 1700? I've got both VirtualBox and VMware Player installed.

 Could you potentially check if you can turn on windows features for Hyper-v?  Please? It  doesn't let me turn it on, it says that I need to enable Virtualization in the firmware.  I have an as rock X370 taichi.  I have IOMMU on in bios. I am so desperate. I just want a virtual machine which I can run a VPN on while I download confidential things.  Meanwhile I could game on my real machine without VPN.   I figured Hyper-v was best for that.  But I don't know anymore. 

 

 You seem to know a lot about virtual machines, which one do you think is best for my use case?  It also needs to be able to download the stuff to hard drives which are connected to my real systemIt also needs to be able to download the stuff to hard drives which are connected to my real system

[KuJoe]

5 hours ago, Solocamper said:

 Could you potentially check if you can turn on windows features for Hyper-v?  Please? It  doesn't let me turn it on, it says that I need to enable Virtualization in the firmware.  I have an as rock X370 taichi.  I have IOMMU on in bios. I am so desperate. I just want a virtual machine which I can run a VPN on while I download confidential things.  Meanwhile I could game on my real machine without VPN.   I figured Hyper-v was best for that.  But I don't know anymore. 

 

 You seem to know a lot about virtual machines, which one do you think is best for my use case?  It also needs to be able to download the stuff to hard drives which are connected to my real systemIt also needs to be able to download the stuff to hard drives which are connected to my real system

I was able to install the Hyper-V features in Windows 10 64bit. I don't know about ASRock, but in my ASUS BIOS I had to enable "SVM" so check to see if you have that feature in yours. I am using the ASUS Prime B350-Plus so if a B350 board has it so should the X370.

 

It was under the Advanced -> CPU menus for me.

 

As for which one is the best, I'm doing a clean install of Windows 7 in VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, and Hyper-V right now and so far VMware Workstation has the easiest install. I'll do some benchmarks to see which one uses the least amount of resources and which one performs better.

[KuJoe]

OK so I ran into a few snags...

 

1) Apparently Hyper-V doesn't play well with VMware Workstation so I had to remove it for now.

 

2) The Windows 7 Pro ISO I had was corrupt so I had to snag another ISO.

 

3) I had to disable the "Credential Guard" in Windows 10 to get VMware Workstation and VirtualBox to start the VM, a little annoying but a few lines in a command prompt and a reboot fixed it.

 

Some updates:

1) VMware Workstation recognized the ISO and performed an "Easy Install" which meant fewer clicks for me, it was basically an unattended install so I focused on the VirtualBox build instead. VirtualBox got to the desktop before VMware Workstation completed the unattended install so it appears to be faster in the building process albeit by less than 1 minute.

 

2) I hooked up a 256GB SSD I had lying around (SanDisk X210) to the desktop via USB 3.0 and I'm seeing a noticeable improvement already compared to the laptop HDD I was using so testing should be much more accurate.

 

3) The VMware Workstation VM automatically detected and added Bluetooth support to my VM so if I connect any BT devices my VM should be able to use it, I just thought it was neat and worth noting if you plan on hooking up other peripherals to your VM it looks like VMware handles them out of the box with no configuration.

 

Some results:

1) The VMware Workstation VM is noticeably more responsive. I'm just doing some browsing, downloading, and installing smaller software but the windows respond much faster with little to no lag when running apps. Right now both have 200 Windows Updates being installed and the VMware VM is more usable while they're downloading.

 

2) I ran some iperf tests to see how the virtual NICs perform (both with Intel E1000 drivers) and the results are interesting. Connectivity between the host and VirtualBox guest is much faster (685Mbps versus 310Mbps on the VMware VM), but when I run the test to another PC on the same network the VMware VM has a performance lead (615Mbps versus 474Mbps on the VirutalBox VM). This means that if you're just talking to the VM via the host then VirtualBox would yield the best network performance whereas if other devices on your network will be accessing the VM then VMware would be the better choice so far. Please note I have them both setup as a Bridged Adapter instead of the default NAT. I also have the Windows firewalls disabled on both VMs. I also waited for the Windows Updates to finish downloading before running the iperf tests.

[Solocamper]

2 hours ago, KuJoe said:

OK so I ran into a few snags...

 

1) Apparently Hyper-V doesn't play well with VMware Workstation so I had to remove it for now.

 

2) The Windows 7 Pro ISO I had was corrupt so I had to snag another ISO.

 

3) I had to disable the "Credential Guard" in Windows 10 to get VMware Workstation and VirtualBox to start the VM, a little annoying but a few lines in a command prompt and a reboot fixed it.

 

Some updates:

1) VMware Workstation recognized the ISO and performed an "Easy Install" which meant fewer clicks for me, it was basically an unattended install so I focused on the VirtualBox build instead. VirtualBox got to the desktop before VMware Workstation completed the unattended install so it appears to be faster in the building process albeit by less than 1 minute.

 

2) I hooked up a 256GB SSD I had lying around (SanDisk X210) to the desktop via USB 3.0 and I'm seeing a noticeable improvement already compared to the laptop HDD I was using so testing should be much more accurate.

 

3) The VMware Workstation VM automatically detected and added Bluetooth support to my VM so if I connect any BT devices my VM should be able to use it, I just thought it was neat and worth noting if you plan on hooking up other peripherals to your VM it looks like VMware handles them out of the box with no configuration.

 

Some results:

1) The VMware Workstation VM is noticeably more responsive. I'm just doing some browsing, downloading, and installing smaller software but the windows respond much faster with little to no lag when running apps. Right now both have 200 Windows Updates being installed and the VMware VM is more usable while they're downloading.

 

2) I ran some iperf tests to see how the virtual NICs perform (both with Intel E1000 drivers) and the results are interesting. Connectivity between the host and VirtualBox guest is much faster (685Mbps versus 310Mbps on the VMware VM), but when I run the test to another PC on the same network the VMware VM has a performance lead (615Mbps versus 474Mbps on the VirutalBox VM). This means that if you're just talking to the VM via the host then VirtualBox would yield the best network performance whereas if other devices on your network will be accessing the VM then VMware would be the better choice so far. Please note I have them both setup as a Bridged Adapter instead of the default NAT. I also have the Windows firewalls disabled on both VMs. I also waited for the Windows Updates to finish downloading before running the iperf tests.

I guess I will go for vmware. But my question is, is there a way to share a drive that is hooked up to the host machine to the guest virtual machine. But that drive still needs to be a part of the main machine.   If that makes any sense.

[The Benjamins]

4 minutes ago, Solocamper said:

I guess I will go for vmware. But my question is, is there a way to share a drive that is hooked up to the host machine to the guest virtual machine. But that drive still needs to be a part of the main machine.   If that makes any sense.

you can do a normal drive share on the host and have the at minimum the host included in the vlan, and then attach the drive as a network drive. some VM software may allow you to add a physical drive to the VM but I am not sure if it works for multiple VM accessing the same drive. I only have experience with HyperV on my server.

[KuJoe]

40 minutes ago, Solocamper said:

I guess I will go for vmware. But my question is, is there a way to share a drive that is hooked up to the host machine to the guest virtual machine. But that drive still needs to be a part of the main machine.   If that makes any sense.

Both VMware Workstation and VirtualBox have the option to setup "shared folders" which are folders on the host that are attached to the VMs so you can access them like a local drive.

[KuJoe]

Here are the CPU and RAM usage numbers while the VMs are running but idle:

VMware Workstation = 0% CPU, 114MB of RAM

VirtualBox = 0.3-1% CPU, 193MB of RAM

 

Here are the Cinebench R15 scores (2x R7 1700 Cores @ 3GHz):

VMWare Workstation = 218

VirtualBox = 230

[The Benjamins]

10 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Here are the CPU and RAM usage numbers while the VMs are running but idle:

VMware Workstation = 0% CPU, 114MB of RAM

VirtualBox = 0.3-1% CPU, 193MB of RAM

 

Here are the Cinebench R15 scores (2x R7 1700 Cores @ 3GHz):

VMWare Workstation = 218

VirtualBox = 230

I wounder how HyperV compares, sucks you had issues running that one.

[KuJoe]

Just now, The Benjamins said:

I wounder how HyperV compares, sucks you had issues running that one.

I'm going to try it out, i just need to uninstall VMware Workstation before I do.