Running a virtual machine on a dedicated processor or core

Question

Our base system runs on Linux but unfortunately the UI has to be on Windows. Its a long story. But thats the requirement. So our idea was to run Windows in a virtual machine using VirtualBox or Xen. Because of our real-time performance constraints, we want to isolate the virtual machine to a single processor (in case of a multi-processor machine) or a processor core in case of a multi-core processor.

Is something like this possible? Can processor (core) affinity be set on the process running the virtual machine? Is one virtualization platform better than another for this requirement. I am confused with Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, OpenVZ, etc.

Solution

If you run a virtualization system that uses a single process per machine, such as VirtualBox or VMWare Server, you can set the affinity of that process to a particular processor.

This guide shows you how:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/setting-processor-affinity-certain-task-or-process.html

Comments

[Cocoro Cara]

ah ha! moment here. I was just reading that post. And saw your reply posted at the same time. Thank you. I am about to try it out.