The installation of Mac OS X El Capitan or macOS Sierra on VirtualBox is not.Virtual machines are convenient because users don't need to switch computers to run two or more operating systems simultaneously. But this convenience has a cost and that is the performance penalty that you pay by using virtual machines.The best paid hypervisors available are Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Most of this has been done on my 3.06 GHz i3-based 21.5 Mid 2010 iMac with 12 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan, but I have also run VirtualBox and Andy on my 2.0 GHz Core Duo 13.3 Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook with 12 GB RAM and El Capitan. The MacBook is quite a bit slower with Andy than the i3-based iMac.There is a good reason why you (or the IT department) opted for a Mac, the only ‘issue’ is that many the best games are developed for the world's most popular operating system: sorry macOS – that's Windows. Of course, you can always hit up your iOS device to play games but the screen size and computing power is really what matters.If these emulated nodes must also run on a hypervisor, as most commercial router images require, then they are running as nested virtual machines inside the host virtual machine. You may install a standalone version of Antidote on your personal computer using the Vagrant virtual environment provisioning tool.In this post, I show you how to run Antidote on a Linux system with KVM, instead of VirtualBox, on your local PC to achieve better performance — especially on older hardware.Antidote runs emulated network nodes inside a host virtual machine. Antidote is the network emulator that runs the labs on the Network Reliability Labs web site. Unfortunately, the prefabricated nature of the Mac isn't much help here.What it does do well, however, is allow you focus on the task and get the job done by squeezing the most out of the installed hardware. Of course, the specifications of that hardware is key in terms of performance both for daily tasks but particular for games, so the better system specs the Mac has, the better the virtual machine’s and therefore the guest OS's performance will be greater too.
Virtualbox Emulator Slow Mac OS XOlder hardware, like my Lenovo T420 laptop, which uses a 2nd generation Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor, will not benefit from those improvements. However, the planned VirtualBox nested virtualization features require a 5th generation Core i5 or i7 Broadwell processor, or newer, or an AMD processor. See the VirtualBox 6.0 changelog and the VirtualBox 6.1 beta release notes for more information. Vagrant and VirtualBox are both cross-platform, open-source tools.The VirtualBox developers plan to improve support for nested virtualization. When to use VirtualBoxIf you plan to run Antidote on a Mac or a PC, you should use Antidote’s standard installation with VirtualBox 1. If you are using a Linux system, you can get better performance if you use Libvirt and KVM, which provide native support for nested virtualization. If it is “N”, run the following commands to enable nested virtualization: $ sudo modprobe -r kvm_intelTo make the changes persistent after a reboot, add a line with the text, options kvm_intel nested=1, to the file /etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf, as shown below. You may need to change your PC’s BIOS or EFI settings.Check the nested virtualization settings on the host computer: $ cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nestedThe output should be “Y”. If it returns 0, then something is wrong. $ grep -cw vmx /proc/cpuinfoIt should return a value equal to the number of virtual cores on your processor. Enter the following commands in the VM’s terminal. The Antidote Vagrant install guide also requires the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin. The installation process will build it from the source code, so it may take a few minute to complete: $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirtInstall the other Vagrant plugins. Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment-out all the lines with deb-src at the start, as shown below: $ sudo sed -i 's/# deb-src/deb-src/g' /etc/apt/sources.listInstall the build dependencies for the vagrant-libvirt plugin: $ sudo apt build-dep -y vagrant ruby-libvirt$ sudo apt install -y qemu libvirt-bin ebtables dnsmasq-base$ sudo apt install -y libxslt-dev libxml2-dev libvirt-dev zlib1g-dev ruby-devInstall the plugin. $ sudo apt install nfs-kernel-serverEnable the source code repositories so you can build the vagrant-libvirt plugin. Install an NFS server, if it is not already installed. Download and install AntidoteAntidote requires you to create a lessons directory before you install it. You need access to vagrantcloud.com to download the Vagrant box specified in Antidote’s Vagrantfile.After you create an account, log in to Vagrant with the following command: $ vagrant cloud auth loginEnter your Vagrantcloud userid and password. $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdaterFinally, create account on vagrantcloud.com. $ git clone Antidote has some default values pre-configured the tell it which Vagrant provider to use and how much resources the Minikube VM should consume. That is, each of these should be sub-directories of the same directory. Unless you specify a new location in the antidote-config.yml configuration file (see below), you must install this directory at the same point in your filesystem as the nrelabs-curriculum directory. $ mkdir ~/antidote-localDownload the antidote-selfmedicate directory. Below, I describe each line in the file. For my system I chose the following configurations: vm_config:Save the file. $ cd antidote-selfmedicateEdit the file and enter in values appropriate for your own situation. ProviderChange the provider to libvirt. CoresI found performance is much better when I respect the KVM Performance Limits for virtual CPU cores, so I set the VM vCPU requirements to 2 CPU, which is appropriate for my laptop. After some experiments, I found that running an idle Antidote VM with 4 GB of RAM, alongside the other tools I use, results in the general performance of my laptop staying in an acceptable range and, when using Libvirt instead of VirtualBox, seems to support the lessons currently available in the curriculum — just barely. It is not powerful enough to run the Antidote VM using default configurations. How view summaries in write checks quickbooks for macI ran lessons that started one, two, and three VMs. Each nested VM supported a Juniper VQFX router image. Then, I reinstalled Ubuntu Linux 18.04 and ran Antidote with VirtualBox.I ran lessons that launched QEMU/KVM nested virtual machines as network nodes. I ran Antidote with Libvirt on my Ubuntu Linux 18.04 laptop. Testing performanceI compared Antidote’s performance on my Linux PC with both Libvirt and VirtualBox. Vagrant will read the Vagrantfile in the antidote-selfmedicate directory and create the environment specified in the file: $ cd ~/antidote-local/antidote-selfmedicateIt may take a long time to get started because it is downloading large files from the NRE Labs repositories. However, the three-VM test showed a large improvement in performance for the Libvirt provider compared to the VirtualBox provider. The Libvirt provider performed a bit better in the two-VM tests. Start time, in secondsI was surprised to see the performance was so close for the lessons with one VM. ConclusionRunning the Antidote network emulator on a Linux system using KVM and Libvirt, instead of VirtualBox, results in measurably better performance, especially when using an older computer, or when you have limited memory. On that site, Antidote is running on bare metal on a modern server, so it is much faster.
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