Question Virtualization Machine - Intel or AMD?

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JayMX

Member
Oct 18, 2022
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Hello I am looking to build a new computer which I want to use as a VM host - I use Windows Hyper-V (hypervisor) sometimes VirtualBox too. Doing some research (not extensive) I read that latest big/little Intel CPUs have issues with Virtualization in that p/e cores are assigned in a random manner (?) or not optimally, hence hampering performance of VMs. Is this true and if yes to what extent? Also read some people disabling e-cores but I wouldn't like to do that.

On the other hand AMD offers same type of high performance cores so theoretically there shouldn't be an issue - but never worked on AMD machine before so would appreciate any kind of tip or things to watch out.

I am looking at the latest offers from both, either Zen4 or Raptor Lake platforms preferably with DDR5 for the ECC support.
 

Leeea

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2020
3,617
5,363
136
Do not really have a lot off time to answer, but need to mention:

Gen 1 hyperv defaults to virtual IDE interface for the HDD. This is slow. IDE can only issue 1 operation at a time.

Quick hacks:
Give the VM four gig of memory and get rid of the page file.

Mount a second file drive as the page file drive.

Does not matter if in the same drive as your os drive file, you have doubled your IOPs.


Mount a second drive in the VM as a SCSI drive. This is the best fix to sluggish gen1 hyperV VMs.

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The real fix is to switch to gen2 VM and mount your boot drive as virtual SCSI, but this is not always possible.
 
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