Gadgetory

we've done a lot of content using lime text under a top rating system over the last little while some of it was focused on the safe redundant storage features of it like this one about repurposing older computer hardware to build a more robust Ness while some of it was more focused on the virtualization features of unread that allow multiple virtual computers we've demoed as many as seven discrete gaming rigs at a time to live on top of that safe redundant storage but while we've discussed how cool that is and demonstrated really strong performance with these VMs or virtual machines we haven't quantified apples-to-apples how they compare with running the operating system software directly on the hardware or the bare metal so let's do that today then shall we the gtx 980ti VR edition from EVGA provides an industry-leading graphics experience as well as a five and a quarter inch bay with easy access inputs for your VR device learn more at the link in the video description so I think we should open with a primer on what this word virtualization really means those of you who are intimately familiar with it can skip ahead because Tarun gave me a hard time after we filmed the pro Drupal your networking speed video about not really explaining what I was talking about now it's kind of like well it's kind of like SLI for networking and he's like well why didn't you just say that in the video so let's start with an analogy this is a gigabit network interface card or NIC it's physical because I can hold it in my hand and it's a network interface card because it connects whatever it's plugged into into a network and allows those two things to communicate or interface with each other at a speed of one gigabit or about a hundred and ten megabytes per second pretty straightforward a virtual NIC is inherently more abstract while it does still require some hardware I mean without a physical cable plugged into something it can't connect to a device outside of the machine on which it resides and in most cases it presents itself to the operating system as though it is a piece of hardware it's actually just some clever software pretending to be hardware which gives it some cool functionality not the least of which is that it is able to share its resources so back to our physical NIC again it's got that gigabit connection speed I talked about before well by creating two virtual NICs we can actually share that speed between virtual devices like I did in the gaming nas video where we had both a file server and the gaming machine using the same network connection so this is a very flexible solution because it means that either of these devices can use anywhere from 0 all the way to 100% of the available resources sharing them dynamically and thanks to some really cool tech from Intel and AMD this can even be done on things like CPUs meaning that you can create entire virtual computers full of virtual devices that share physical resources with each other for better overall efficiency Poole Linus but what was up with that big asterisk a minute ago well the KDM kernel-based virtual machine project at Red Hat which is what on rate is using to power its virtualization is some pretty freakin impressive software but virtual devices do not have 100% of the performance of the physical devices because while the days of emulation that's a very slow way of doing this virtual device stuff are basically over there is still some overhead involved which thank you for your patience by the way brings us finally to the topic for today how much of our raw or bare metal performance are we giving up when we do a project like gaming nas or seven gamers one CPU so for this test I actually ended up using my personal rig because I had to work on it at home and I left my test bench at the office but the good news is that with it's 59 60 X rampage 5 extreme x99 motherboard gtx 980ti and 64 gigs of Dominator memory my rig is pretty much the same as my usual test bench so I started then by establishing my baseline performance I ran my test suite with all eight cores active then I used the BIOS to turn off one of the physical cores on the CPU making it effectively a seven core this was done because for the best performance on on raid anyway in games it's best to leave a core aside for unread to use and give everything else to your virtual machine and while gaming actually didn't end up being affected negatively at all I mean these results are within my margin of error for these tests this was expected since games are not very CPU bound these days and the video card itself is actually passed through as a physical device to the virtual machine Cinebench also showed the same results our virtual 7 core and our bare metal 7 core performed the same leaving the only tests that showed a dramatic difference being the synthetic memory and cache tests in AI 264 so depending on the workload it is possible that these extra nanoseconds of additional latency could be a problem but from looking at performance in consumer oriented workloads it seems like we are pretty darn close to a VM being a solid alternative to running straight on the hardware now then it's just got to get a little bit easier for everyday people to do because while some of the benefits virtualizing servers to consolidate functionality are more applicable to the data center there is some really cool stuff that I can envision for a consumer facing product like on raid as well with the gaming as we did a little while back being just the tip of the iceburg tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop it lets you tunnel so to speak into up to 20 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in a different country so you know let's say for example you want to access a website that is blocked in your country or you want to access a service that is just plain not available in your country due to licensing or whatever else ha screw that because they've got apps for iOS Android PC and Mac and they also have a Chrome extension they're super easy to use just pick a country press the friendly-looking button and boom your connection gets encrypted which by the way tunnel bear doesn't actually log in any of your activity which is very cool and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as though you're in a different country and the best part of tunnel bear is that your first 500 megabytes is absolutely free and after that the unlimited plans are very reasonably priced so check it out at the link in the video description and by the way you can save 10% by using that that's tunnel bear comm /l TT so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video well you know where that button is but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop an Amazon instructions up there by buying a cool shirt like this one or by joining our community forum you can answer people's questions you can get your questions about tech Anthony you can just hang out and chat now that you're done doing probably all of that stuff or at least some of it you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out this video where I am doing something really cool or Luke is I'm not sure I don't know which video we're teasing