VirtualBox VM Performance Test

📅 February 3, 2023
“Is a VirtualBox VM faster or slower than the real hardware on which it is running?”

This is a question that I wanted to measure using some common CPU benchmarking utilities, and I had the chance to test it out using the same VMs running on two separate systems: one running Linux (Ubuntu Cinnamon 22.04), and the other running Windows 10. I migrated the same Linux and Windows 10/11 VMs between the systems to benchmark the results.

Would there be any speed differences? What if a VM utilized the same number of cores as the host CPU? Will that affect performance? Is virtualization slower?

I ran a few informal tests of my own in case others would like some comparison material, and these are my results.