Visualized Windows running in a VM environment STILL uses NTFS. All you've done is put a logical NTFS formatted volume on top of the host OS's filesystem. Creating an extra layer. Bernard111 was asking about running Windows directly from a *nix filesystem, like installing Windows native on an ext4 or UFS filesystem to reap the performance benefits of said filesystems in contrast to installing it on NTFS. A VM installation of Windows on top of a running *nix OS does not accomplish this, and arguably can only diminish performance of the guest OS--even if it's not by much, or not noticeable to the end user--which is not what Bernard111 was trying to find out.
There are undoubtedly papers published by the hypervisor vendors that cover this, but I don't have any references offhand. The overhead comes from a few areas where they can't let the virtual machine's instructions run unimpeded: virtual memory accesses (segmenting, page tables); privileged instructions like system calls; and writing to device registers. Modern Intel and AMD CPUs have hardware to make some of these operations faster (VT extensions). And the hypervisor vendors provide libraries to make device usage faster (such as the virtio driver, which allows the VM to access things like the ethernet more efficiently than if it was peeking and poking at a virtualized ethernet chip). But there are also performance gains. Windows XP can only use around 3.5GB of memory no matter how much is there. I give my VMs 4GB of memory each, but they run on a 16GB Linux system, any disk i/o benefits from having a few gigabytes of cache courtesy of Linux. (You'd get the same benefit running on a Windows host, of course).
Very good point. Any speedup would need to come from intelligent read-ahead and write-behind done by Linux's extfs driver. VM hypervisors can also mount a portion of the host system's filesystem on the guest, so you could set things up so a Windows swap file is an ext file, but I can't quantify how much CPU overhead this would entail.
may I know what trading software your using ? I'm on windows XP and too poor to get an upgrade. so I thought of ubuntu
There aren't many mainstream Linux-based front ends from IB TWS. As others have pointed out, QuoteTracker does run on Linux under the Wine environment. I don't know if Ninja or others run reliably (or fast enough) under Wine.
sierrachart... It runs ok under wine but the fonts are unbearable/unfixable and it's tricky to use the compiler. I think sierrachart made an announcement that they will have a linux native build of their software eventually...
Surprisingly Hyper-V is pretty good/fast compared to the others: VMware, Citrix, Xen, etc. As stated, it all depends on the chipset you have and the hardware configuration you are running. Bare metal will always be faster but a proper virtual host can be pretty darn close and over RDP or even things like tcoip the end user would never know... On the other hand you can really hammer a raid array and slow things down by overbooking. I don't know why people don't get the right tool for the job.