Vagrant 1.8.5 and VirtualBox 5.1 Networking Performance

I’m not trying to make this a Vagrant/VirtualBox blog, but as they are currently tools I use almost continuously so new versions, features, and tips to increase their performance are obviously of great interest.

With Vagrant 1.8.5 released Monday and now supporting VirtualBox 5.1, I’ve had some time to conduct a few informal network performance tests. The good news is that network performance with the Virtio Paravirtulized driver appears to be even better, an informal test showed 471Mbits/s versus the previous 361Mbits/s of VirtualBox 5.0.24 – same hardware, both using Xenial.

Additionally, to enable Virtio I’ve also come across an even either method through Vagrant. Simply add the following like to your Vagrantfile inside the VirtualBox provider block:

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--nictype1", "virtio" ]