KVM & libvirt VS VirtualBox for Windows 10 VMs

[Kalandarisvili]

Dear community, 

I seek your advice on the topic of virtualization. Our small business has 10 PCs (1TB SSD, i7-6700K, GTX1060, WIN10 PRO) running VirtualBox serving Windows 10 workspaces for our collaborators.

We use Raspberry PIs as thin clients with Remmina aplication to connect to VMs via RDP.

 

This setup has proved itself good for several years, however we would like to try something else to see if there could be room for performance gain + an option for central VM management.

I'd like to know if there is any sensible performance gain in swicthing from VirtualBox with guest additions and GPU acceleration to KVM. 

Our VMs run at 1920x1080 resolution mostly. Has anyone run benchmarks?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Have you looked into rds on windows server? Its build for exactly this use case. You can have vms or people sharing one server, and it will auto setup and manage the workplace for them and load balance between servers.

[DP1]

How many virtual machines are there across 10 physical servers?

What are they doing [mostly]?

You mentioned you're looking to get some performance gain; is it storage iops, CPU or video/graphics performance?

 

With KVM on Linux you might get some memory savings (if you enable kernel same page merging) however from pure performance standpoint you are not going to get any major improvements.

 

[Kalandarisvili]

19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Have you looked into rds on windows server? Its build for exactly this use case. You can have vms or people sharing one server, and it will auto setup and manage the workplace for them and load balance between servers.

At the beginning of the project we wanted to save money on Widows server licences, thus went for Win10PRO + VirtualBox. Can something like RDS be setup for Windows 10?

[Kalandarisvili]

10 hours ago, DP1 said:

How many virtual machines are there across 10 physical servers?

What are they doing [mostly]?

You mentioned you're looking to get some performance gain; is it storage iops, CPU or video/graphics performance?

 

With KVM on Linux you might get some memory savings (if you enable kernel same page merging) however from pure performance standpoint you are not going to get any major improvements.

 

We run 60 VMs per 10 servers - I would mostly be interested in storage IOPS and Graphics performance. I also wonder if exchanging RDP with SPICE would help?

[Meic]

On 4/1/2019 at 11:11 AM, Kalandarisvili said:

I'd like to know if there is any sensible performance gain in swicthing from VirtualBox with guest additions and GPU acceleration to KVM. 

Virtual box has just released V6 with better Display driver support (I believe it is now very similar to VMWare): https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0#v0

 

Maybe it would be worth upgrading to see if you get much performance increase without too big a change?

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 hours ago, Kalandarisvili said:

At the beginning of the project we wanted to save money on Widows server licences, thus went for Win10PRO + VirtualBox. Can something like RDS be setup for Windows 10?

you need windows server for rds. But really, the pricing shouldn't be that bad in the scheme of things., esp with 60 users and 10 servers. You probably also not doing licensing right also with your current setup.

 

Are you currently on a domain?

 

Also with rds you normally need less hardware as there is no vm overhead(you can use vms, but no reason to here it seems), so you can save on hardware.

 

 

 

 

[DP1]

After giving this some thought, quite frankly I wouldn't move this setup to linux/KVM. Getting decent performance on KVM for Windows guests is often a challenge, especially when it comes to iops. I do not have much experience with graphics performance, but last time I checked Virtualbox wasn't bad at all. 

 

I personally do not have experience with SPICE so wouldn't be able to comment on that.