So
I run Fedora on my laptop, but I need to virtualize windows, usually I
just use virtual box, but the GUI performance is sluggish.
I was wondering what would be the best sofware to use to virtualize
windows, I need the GUI to be at least reasonably responsive so I can
use office, and I need to be able to route a USB port to the VM so I can
sync my iPod.
Hmm if it was sluggish it may have been that you didnt have the right stuff checked.
Did you install virtualbox additions onto the Windows VM? Also did you enable graphics acceleration in the settings?
Virtalbox is decent.
Native virtualisation is done mainly by KVM/qemu and well supported by Fedora. You can install virt-manager at the very basics.
You'll also want to make sure your computer supports Intel VT or AMD V. Its sometimes disabled by default in the BIOS, this gives better access to the hardware.
You may find this useful https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Getting_Started_Guide/index.html
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_virtualization
hmm thanks, and yes I install guest additions usually, no mater what the settings it feels slugish.
When I was playing around with VirtualBox on Ubuntu I had similar results as far as sluggish operation, it was stable but slow, of course this was on testing hardware not my desktop.
I would also suggest using the native virtualization in Fedora as long as you don't need hardware pass through it's pretty easy to do and should be more robust in my opinion.
I just need responsiveness.
i.e make it feel like I'm using word on a native windows install.
Give our suggestion a try, you don't have to uninstall VirtualBox or anything like that, this link might help you, it's for XP but is really the same for any Windows OS.
One suggestion I'd make is that the VM having it's own hard drive is a advantage, sharing space on the Linux partition might cause some latency, if you don't have a second drive then a separate partition is the next best thing....but that is just my opinion.
This might also help....
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/78438/stable-use-of-windows-7-guest-vm-on-fedora/
the laptop only has an M.2 drive slot. So I'm not too worried about latency.
I'm using Virtualbox on Linux Mint 17.3, for Windows (all versions from 2000 server upwards, XP to 10). Windows 7 loads from nothing to usable in about 10 seconds. I've given it 2 cores and 4GB of memory. USB support, no problem. Network connection is set to Internal Network, as it's door to the outside world is via a virtual pfsense, bridged to the router.
Background hardware is an ASUS Sabertooth with 32GB, running an AMD FX8370 (8-cores). 500GB SSD for the OS and Apps, WD Black for storage. I chose the FX8370 for the virtualization features and it's certainly living up to it's claims.
You'll need something larger than a Laptop for that.
KVx only goes sofar, and it has some large latencies for virtualization, since regardless of what you are doing there is a middleman in between the host and guest OS.
My best suggestion would be either make sure your guest Harddrive file is running on a FAST hd, and even then accept the slower performance.
Whats worse is your guest is Windows which has a high load rendering your desktop and so on, which only makes it ALOT worse even if you actively do hardware passthrough of a GPU, and even then expect latencies, not to mention horrid support for virtualized drivers.
The VMbox Emulated GPU is a 128mb GPU(im guessing Window$ is optimized for 2gb or so, and it's DDR, not GDDR) at most from what i recollect, so don't expect a miracle when windows emulating as an OS platform.
Id would advice you to dual boot the windows stuff you need to do.
There is a GUI for Qemu, forgot it's name though, which can handle your use cases of passthrough, and it's somewhat simple to figure out even with HW passthrough.
Have you tried remote desktop to the VM? It should feel smooth for office work.
If had the most success with Virtualbox myself. The must work thing for me is passing through an iPhone so I can use it with iTunes and it been spotty with QEMU.
I have not tried in awhile but I did notice on the disk performance side of thing there was a huge difference on Virtualbox using a IDE HD compared to a SATA controller. The IDE was x3 faster. This was a long time ago and I have not rechecked it. I could be wrong on this. The measurement I was doing was network transfers from the client to host which was what I was interested in.
any trick o make the ui responsive/
Running VM's on Laptop hardware can be finicky... having the proper extensions supported is key.
Have you checked yet if your laptop actually supports VT-d / VT-x?
its arriving tmr.
I suspect it will, T460s with an i7 6600U.
According to : http://ark.intel.com/products/88192/Intel-Core-i7-6600U-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_40-GHz
That processor supports Virtualization Technology (VT-x) Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT) so it should work. My question is whether you are allocating enough resources to the VM to properly run it...
I plan to allocate 2-3 threads and 4-8gb of ram.
Not sure what else I should be allocating, I only ever do virtualization in a server enviroment so I don't normally care about GUI performance.
What laptop have you been using that has slow performance?
The T460 does indeed support VT, you may need to enable it first as it usually comes disabled in the BIOS.
You also shouldn't have to much issue with GUI performance. I've never noticed any.
every PC I have done virtualization with has had sluggish performance in the GUI, (with VT enabled)
so I'm just wondering if theirs tricks I need to do to improve performance.
Well to give you an idea i have a Win10 VM in virtualbox with 2cpu. default paravirtualsation, enabled VT-x enabled nested paging, under display enabled 3d accelleration with 128mb of vram.
No issues with slowness.