Do power settings in the actual VMs affect performance of the virtual machines?
Do power settings matter for Hyper-V instances
electrical-powerhyper-v
electrical-powerhyper-v
Do power settings in the actual VMs affect performance of the virtual machines?
Best Answer
The only power management exposed to the guest VM involves processor idling states. Changing the power policy within the guest can influence how often the guest puts its virtual processors into these idle states. So, yes, you can affect the guest's performance via power settings.
With that said, you won't be able to affect the performance by much, as these idle states are only really used when there isn't any work to do. The amount by which you might affect the scheduler running within the guest is probably swamped by the effect of the hypervisor scheduling the virtual processors.
When running one VM with a constant CPU load, I would expect no measurable difference based on guest power settings. When running lots of VMs with bursty loads, changing power settings within a guest could cause it to use more CPU time than it really needs, which might cause the other VMs to suffer somewhat.