Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

2 has been a big issue with a recent client because Virtualbox is a fucking pig in terms of features and performance compared to the commercial alternatives.

My advice is to cough up an hour or two salary and pay for parallels or VMware (if on Mac)

View on HN

I've been using Vagrant + Virtualbox and have been happy with it. Is Vagrant + VMWare really that much of a step up in performance? Could you explain which features have been helpful? Thanks.

Not the parent, but anecdotally, Vagrant + Parallels runs MUCH faster on my 15" MacBook Pro than Vagrant + VirtualBox. VM startup time is shorter, and CPU usage seems to be lighter. For instance, I worked on a project where I had a long-running process that would do a lot of file I/O and periodically collect the results and run some calculations. On VirtualBox, this basically pegged a CPU core while it was running, but when I switched to Parallels, CPU usage hovered around 5%. (I'm guessing this particular example is more to do with VirtualBox's dog-slow shared folders, but still relevant, I think.)

Vbox shared folders don't support POSIX permissions (so you can't chmod/chown in the /Vagrant mount)

Vbox (or the Vagrant use of it) is hard coded to use a NAT as the default interface

The common "Vagrant synced folders are slow" relates exclusively to Virtualbox shared folders.

Also a recommendation here against Hyper V.

Can you elaborate?

At least for me, using Hyper-V is problematic because I can't also run VMware Workstation at the same time. I have to boot into different configurations to run them side-by-side. My macOS experience is that running both on your machine is straightforward.

But how did hyperv perform when you did run it? Did you use it with Vagrant or just on it's own?

Well one of the killers I found very recently was if you open the console of the VM before it has booted it sets the caps lock on which instantly shafts entry of the grub commmand line so initial configuration of that is pissing in the dark because you can’t observe it without affecting it.

Then there’s the periodic refusal to talk on the network even if the virtual switches are configured properly.

Then the inexplicable “slow boot from hell” which happens randomly where it’ll just hang starting up the kernel at 0% CPU for up to 8 minutes.

This is with CentOS 7 on a gen2 machine.

I did that a few years ago, and I found that VMware support lagged VBox. There were some plugins that looked like they might help, but I could never get them to work.

Could you elaborate on what features the VMware provider didn't support?

at least in the US, anything work-related that you pay for out of pocket is tax-deductible if your employer doesn't reimburse you or you're self-employed.

Doesn't make a lick of difference if you lack enough itemized deductions, otherwise you take the standard deduction like everybody else.

Honestly though, VMWare is pretty cheap. VMWare Workstation Player and VMWare Fusion aren't cheap upfront, but the upgrade pricing to stay current is decent - I spend more on my JetBrains licenses every year. It's worth it to have a fast and mostly headache-free virtualization experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com