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Is there much performance difference between Xen and virtual box?

yazz.com
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2 Answers2

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The difference between Xen and Virtualbox is their usage or application. Virtualbox is meant to be used as a desktop virtualization layer. So Virtualbox expects you to have an OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) already installed. In other words, Virtualbox can add virtualization to a desktop host OS.

Xen is quite the opposite. It can be thought of as the host OS even though you wouldn't use it like a desktop environment. In terms of performance, Xen will probably edge out VirtualBox as it is a "bare-metal" hypervisor since the host OS is for Xen is tuned more for virtualization tasks rather than desktop duties.

osij2is
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Unless I've misread the Xen web site that product is a "bare metal" virtualisation layer, whereas Virtualbox sits atop an OS. As such, Virtualbox could not be expected to perform as well as Xen.

John Gardeniers
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