[plug] Windows guest VM's

[William Kenworthy]

On 29/01/13 15:34, Brad Campbell wrote:
> G'day all,
> 
> I often have a need to fire up a Windows VM for work (Autocad, Protel,
> Coolpack, etc).
> 
> For years I've been using a base XP machine because it was small and
> snappy. Recently though I've been using AutoCAD for more than just
> viewing and printing drawings and it has not been fun at all.
> 
> For a test I set up a 64 bit Windows 7 VM and installed the 64 bit
> Autocad in that. The performance difference between the XP and the Win 7
> VM is night and day. I am astonished at how much more responsive the Win
> 7 VM is. Then again, it uses about 4 times the CPU time compared to an
> XP VM, but for interactive foreground stuff it is *much* nicer.
> 
> If you can tolerate the extra CPU cycles and the much increased disk
> footprint, Win 7 is a better bet than XP for a VM guest.
> 
> Spice with the qxl driver is a nice upgrade from VNC too (performance
> and arbitrary auto-sizing resolution support). It even outperforms an
> rdp session straight to the windows VM on a local network.
> 
> Just an observation that I thought was worth mentioning.
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I'll second that - went from win2k to win7 and its a lot better, to the
point I was able to cut the memory back to 512k (severely constrained
host!) with excellent performance, esp. over rdesktop.

Now I am importing the same 32bit qemu image into libvirt on ceph and am
back to slow as a slug so I'll have to do some tuning or reinstall.

BillK