Hyper-V performance comparisons vs physical client

hyper-vvirtual-machinesvirtualization

Are there any comparisons between Hyper-V client machines and their physical equivalent? I've looked around and can find 4000 articles about improving Hyper-V performance, but I can't find any that actually do a side-by-side comparison or give benchmarking numbers.

Ideally, I'm interested in a comparison of CPU, memory, disk, and graphics performance between something like the following:

  • Some powerful workstation (with plenty of RAM) with Windows 7 installed on it directly
  • Same exact worksation with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the bare Server role) and a full-screen Windows 7 client machine

Virtual Server 2005 had performance that didn't compare at all with actual hardware, but with the advances in CPU and hardware-level virtualization, has performance improved significantly? How obvious would it be to a user of the two above scenarios that one of them was virtualized, and does anybody know of actual benchmarking of this type?

Best Answer

In my own testing there is roughly a 5-10% raw performance hit vs the same workstation running (comparing performance of encoding software and sql server express queries) just windows 7. The biggest drawback is that you really don't want to run aero as graphics performance gets hit.

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