Labs Gallery: Sun xVM VirtualBox 3.0 Ramps Up Challenge to VMware with SMP Support
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Version 3.0 of Sun’s xVM VirtualBox software was released on June 30. With just a couple of new features and a slew of tweaks and bug fixes, the no-cost virtualization product isn’t an evolution, but one that continues in the right direction.
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Here I’ve assigned two virtual CPUs to a guest Ubuntu system. I conducted this test on a Lenovo T400s equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor so I only assigned two CPUs. The VirtualBox documentation suggests that the maximum number of virtual CPUs should not exceed the number of physical cores available.
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To enable virtual machine access to the new SMP feature, it is necessary to enable I/O APIC, which avoids IRQ sharing, with the trade-off that it could negatively impact CPU performance.
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It’s a simple check box parameter to enable the DirectX and OpenGL interface functions during the creation of a virtual machine.
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The final result on my laptop is seen here-a Ubuntu 9.0 “Jaunty Jackalope” guest running on top of Windows Vista.