Install Magic Online bots: Virtualization on Linux

We host an article by Enrique taken from his blog: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en

You can read the original article here: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/instalar-bots-de-magic-online-virtualizacion-en-linux-parte-8-3/

After analyzing systems with Windows as the host operating system, in this second article (the first one is here) I will show you a comparison between the most important programs I have found for virtualization in Linux.
I also remind you the configuration of each VM I have used on the benchmarks, which are setup with the minimum requirements to run the Magic Online client (this is valid for the current version 3.0 not the beta):

• Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 “Lite”
• CPU: 1 kernel
• RAM memory: 1.5 GB
• Hard Disk: 20 GB
• Video Resolution: 1440×900

The OS is a very small version of the original one. You can create an installation disk from the original image and remove all non-required extra tools with a program like nLite. In my case, my version of Windows XP consumes about 60-70 MB of RAM. You can see the reasons for this setup in detail on the previous article of this series.

Virtualization with Linux hosting OS: benchmark setup

I have found out that the non-free software support for Linux is much more limited than for other operating systems. The tools that I have tested on this benchmark are the same I used on Windows virtualization and are also completely free of charge: VirtualBox 4.3.4 by Oracle and VMware Player 6.0.1. If you know another virtualization software for Linux you can tell me so I can also test its performance.

I have compared the performance by measuring the average times of a sequence of tests that any VM will run frequently. The two applications have been tested on a third computer, which differs from the Windows machines, and with the following configuration:

	Computer 3
Hosting OS	Ubuntu 13.04 64bit (Raring Ringtail)
Processor	Intel Core i7 E-610 2.53 GHz
Hardware Virtualization	Yes
RAM Memoria	4 GB
Hard Disk	500 GB 7200rpm
Graphics Card	Intel i915

As I have only one Linux machine available, the comparison focuses on the virtualization software for this OS. I remind you that the tests consists of measuring the time taken for the VM to perform the following tasks:

• VM first boot. Measures the performance without using the cache memory, useful if virtualization software starts upon booting the hosting OS.
• VM second boot. While you don’t run other programs, if you reboot the VM you will see how its performance is improved.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (same software). The aim consists of testing how virtualization software manages computer resources among multiple VMs. This test is useful for measuring the performance if using more than one store.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (other software). This test is used to test how an virtualization tool manages the system resources without caring about other VMs from other software.
• Running Magic Online update tool (Kicker). As this application mainly depends on the communication with the server of Magic Online, I wanted to use it to get an idea of ​​how virtualization software manages the network connection.
• Running Magic Online client. This test allows to compare the performance of data loading of Magic Online as well as the management of the CPU computation performed by the virtualization software.
• Load the price list of the MTGO Library bot. This phase of the bot setup makes heavy use of memory, which is important during the execution of the store.

Results and discussion

The conditions of each test has been controlled in the same way as the description I offered on the article about virtualization for Windows. Each test was repeated 5 times and the result is the average time obtained from these repetitions. The virtual OS has just the required applications pre-installed (Magic Online 3.0, .NET Framework and MTGO Library), and its hard disk has been defragmented and optimized. The bot version used is 6.31. In the following graphic you can see the results (the lower the better value).

Unlike what happened with Windows as the hosting OS, virtualization on Linux does not have a clear winner between both application tested. On one hand, VMware performs much better than VirtualBox on system startup and initializing the Magic Online update tool. This result suggests that VMware has optimized these processes for Windows XP OS client as well as the network management. However, once MTGO Library bot starts the performance of VirtualBox seems to be much better than VMware.

Another important point is the performance drop of the hosting OS when running two VMs at once. It is clear that the bottleneck is imposed by the limited amount of RAM memory (I have no Linux PCs with more memory). VirtualBox quickly makes use of the virtual memory and eventually collapses the hosting OS, while VMware seems to manage this resource a little better.

As I commented for the virtualization in Windows, the best way to use 2 VMs on a machine with limited RAM memory is running each VM with a different application. As you can see from the results, the boot time using VMware and VirtualBox is much lower than with 2 VMs running over the same software.

In conclusion, for machines with Linux as their hosting OS I think I would use the VirtualBox application. While it is slower in the boot step, the performance is much more relevant during the execution of MTGO Library bot, and thus I would give priority to this consideration. If you want to setup 2 stores and you are lack of RAM, then the best solution is certainly to configure each VM with a different application.

On the next article I will describe the tests I have done to benchmark the virtualization in OS X, the third and final hosting OS used in this series.