New to Virtualization-need a little help.

whs · 04 Apr 2013

Here is the tutorial for installing on an external disk.

Portable OS - Carry your OS on an External Drive

kado897 · 04 Apr 2013

You can run a VM from any drive SSD or HDD internal or external, even USB 2 attached although that can be slow.

When you set up the VM just browse to where you want to store it. I currently have 15 VMs set up in VirtualBx on a USB attached HDD.

VirTech · 31 May 2013

We have a Lifebook using a single 120GB SSD running Windows 7, Windows 8, OSX Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu. It runs perfect and is a real discussion point with those who have an interest in this sort of thing.

whs · 31 May 2013

VirTech said:

We have a Lifebook using a single 120GB SSD running Windows 7, Windows 8, OSX Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu. It runs perfect and is a real discussion point with those who have an interest in this sort of thing.

Do you run some of those systems virtual and what do you use for virtualization - especially for Mountain Lion.

jimbo45 · 01 Jun 2013

Hi there
Virtual Machines just eat RAM for breakfast -- you can install a VM on an external USB disk to save space -- even a decent USB2 drive will give acceptable performance -- a USB 3 disk (provided you have USB 3 port(s) will certainly be more than adequate.

You need at least 8 GB RAM on the host to run any sort of virtualisation program - even if you only allocate 1GB RAM to each VM.

If you have a spare SSD then even using this via a USB2 slot will give you EXCELLENT performance when the VM is installed on the SSD. Use one of those SATA==>USB connectors for connecting the SSD to the USB port.

RAM is the key in running VM's.

Cheers
jimbo

whs · 01 Jun 2013

I don't see your point. Whether you install virtual system on an external drive or an internal drive makes no difference for the RAM requirement. And the RAM requirements depend on the system that you run in virtual. Whilst most Linux distros will run OK with 1GB of RAM you should allocate 2 or 3GB of RAM for a Windows system.

The total RAM requirement will depend on the amount of virtual systems that you want to run in parallel. I usually run only 1 virtual system in addition to the host system. And for that, 4GB of RAM are sufficient.

Your point of running virtual systems from an external SSD is well taken. I do that all the time and it performs super from a USB3 port and acceptable from a USB2 port. Here is a tutorial I have made for that kind of setup.

Portable OS - Carry your OS on an External Drive

Btw: I have a total of 6 Linux virtual systems and 1 Windows 8 virtual system. But I never run them concurrently. Once I also ran Android in Virtual but that was not so swift.