XP x64 in VirtualBox on Win7 x64 optimum setup

[JoesMorgue]

What would be the best configuration for the Virtual Computer?

I have 8 Cores in the system, would putting 8 in the XP VM be good or bad [for multi-tasking]

How much memory? Depending on how you look at it, I have 16, 15, 12, or 11 Gigs. [Four 4 Gig sticks, 1 Gig shared Video, 4 gigs for RamDrive]

As for use of the systems: Right now, it is the only desktop in the house [not counting the server] and it's used by everyone. MOSTLY surfing the web, and some smaller games.

The XP system is mostly used by me for now, mainly getting it to function properly. SOME flash games, havn't tried a real game on it yet...

 

[Indianatone]

Hi.
I would give XP 4 cores and no more. You most likely need the other 4 to run the host OS and everything else that is running. Xp64 will take as much RAM as you can throw at it but to be reasonable I would give it 8GB. That is how I run my XP64 VM in VMWare player, 4 cores and 8GB.

 

[JoesMorgue]

Hi.
I would give XP 4 cores and no more. You most likely need the other 4 to run the host OS and everything else that is running. Xp64 will take as much RAM as you can throw at it but to be reasonable I would give it 8GB. That is how I run my XP64 VM in VMWare player, 4 cores and 8GB.

Out of curiousity, I did launch [a long time ago] XP once with 8 cores. All CPU Meter told me 100% load on all cores for several minutes, then it went down to some with no load, the rest with very little. I ran a few apps on Win7, focused on CPU load, nothing weird. Don't remember what [IF] I ran on XP or loads... [Edit note: I do think I MIGHT have had XP limited to 50%]

I never REALLY TESTED to see what would happen if I tried to use either of them that would have put a load on them. I did notice that it takes longer to load XP than with less cores.

I KNOW it will run, and appears to be OK, but didn't do any real tests. Has anybody tested with multi-cores, and using all in the VM?

 

[Indianatone]

Well look at it this way. If you give your virtual machine all the cores WTF does the real machine run on? Think about it????:roflmao:

 

[JoesMorgue]

Well look at it this way. If you give your virtual machine all the cores WTF does the real machine run on? Think about it????:roflmao:

VirtualBox Multi-Threads. Like I said, once fully loaded, the cores dropped down to almost no load or completely idle.

OK. Looks like somebody needs to do a load test. [Probably in 2 days, I doubt I can do it before then, but...]
What should I do to give informative test results? [I don't want to just run a load program]
I think I'm going to do the same test with a 50% limit, and no limit.

 

[Gary]

I would not recommend placing all of your cores to the VM. It does not need that many to run efficiently.

 

[UsernameIssues]

What would be the best configuration for the Virtual Computer?
~~~~
The XP system is mostly used by me for now, mainly getting it to function properly. SOME flash games, havn't tried a real game on it yet...

The best configuration depends on what you are running on the XP system. I only assign 1 CPU (core?) and very little RAM (92MB). Because I run multiple XP VMs at the same time. The app running in these VMs is running as fast as it can and I can easily time the length of time that the app takes to complete its task. Adding more cores and more RAM did not help me for this app.

I also limit each VirtualBox VM to the same one core (CPU ?) on the host via task manager. I've been told this is not a good idea, but my testing shows no real improvement for my XP app if more cores are assigned to VirtualBox - but I did notice a difference in the responsiveness in the host while the VMs were running if I do not limit VirtualBox. If you will be not be using the host while you are using the XP VM, then your "best configuration" would far different than mine.

As far as what is the best benchmarking app(s) for your XP VM - again, that depends on what you will normally be doing in the VM. You can tweak your VirtualBox setup to achieve the best multi-threaded benchmark results using a tool like wPrime (About wPrime | wPrime), but if that benchmark loading does not model the gaming loading, then that might not be the best VirtualBox setup.

 

[JoesMorgue]

The best configuration depends on what you are running on the XP system. I only assign 1 CPU (core?) and very little RAM (92MB). Because I run multiple XP VMs at the same time. The app running in these VMs is running as fast as it can and I can easily time the length of time that the app takes to complete its task. Adding more cores and more RAM did not help me for this app.

I also limit each VirtualBox VM to the same one core (CPU ?) on the host via task manager. I've been told this is not a good idea, but my testing shows no real improvement for my XP app if more cores are assigned to VirtualBox - but I did notice a difference in the responsiveness in the host while the VMs were running if I do not limit VirtualBox. If you will be not be using the host while you are using the XP VM, then your "best configuration" would far different than mine.

As far as what is the best benchmarking app(s) for your XP VM - again, that depends on what you will normally be doing in the VM. You can tweak your VirtualBox setup to achieve the best multi-threaded benchmark results using a tool like wPrime (About wPrime | wPrime), but if that benchmark loading does not model the gaming loading, then that might not be the best VirtualBox setup.

As far as what I will be doing, that is a good question...

I almost NEVER do anything on my 8 core that works a single core, let alone uses multiples. I went overboard partially because my wife said I had to spend $500 to get the year free financing, AND she found some dual-core machines around the $600. I went over her price by about $70 with the blue ray burner. I got the best bang for the buck!

I play BTD5, and the upper rounds tend to load a core pretty well, if my daughter wants to play RollerCoaster Tycoon, she can just minimize my game and play, if my wife needs to do something on it, hit the WinKey, and she could go. The loads never seem to change the behavior of the machine. We word process, SOME spreadsheets, and things like that. The idea of XP is to allow somebody else to do some of the same things on the computer at the same time.

I just wish the built in video could share more than a gig of RAM. I've thought about my son playing W.O.W. on XP while I'm using 7. [XP has the larger screen]

 

[UsernameIssues]

Ok, I'll show my ignorance here:
I'm not sure how W.O.W. could be played via a VB XP VM while also using the host. How would you share the mouse/keyboard?

This might be of interest to you...
When HyperThreading Hurts
...especially the bottom part about AMD CPUs.

 

[JoesMorgue]

Ok, I'll show my ignorance here:
I'm not sure how W.O.W. could be played via a VB XP VM while also using the host. How would you share the mouse/keyboard?

This might be of interest to you...
When HyperThreading Hurts
...especially the bottom part about AMD CPUs.

My computer has two wireless keyboards & mice [mouses?] "connected" to it The secondaries sit on top of my DVD player under the TV with the batteries taken out. When XP is running, it get exclusiveness to the secondary set. If you run it fullscreen on my TV and move mouse 1 over it, NP. If you move mouse 1 to the monitor, mouse 2 will only control the mouse in XP and cannot go over to the monitor. If you click off of XP with mouse 1, mouse 2 continues to work in XP. Same with the keyboard. If you click on XP with mouse 1, either keyboard can type in XP, if not, only keyboard 2.
Because of the kb/mouse[mice?] setup, I think W.O.W. will work in XP just fine.

Now, if my Bulldozer would learn to HyperThread... [I also need a motherboard that takes two of my CPUs]

 

[carwiz]

VMs don't work the way some folks think. You're not "dedicating" cores to a VM; you're simply saying that the VM instructions will be allowed a thread path to the host machine cores. The host processor doesn't care what instructions it's executing or where they're coming from since they're all coming through the same pipes. It's no different than running a bunch of programs at once on the host alone. If you have the power like most 8-core (thread) processors do today, I doubt you'd see any difference in drag. You'd be surprised at just how little the cores are used for most apps.

I ran all eight cores when I had the Windows 8 preview loaded on Oracle VM. I even gave it a 100% cap and had no problems switching back and forth to the host. And I'm just running a "old" i7-2600. What really bogs a system down is I/O. Plant the VM disk on a SSD and it will rip!

 

[UsernameIssues]

...You're not "dedicating" cores to a VM;...

I sure thought that I was doing when I set this on the host:



And the XP VM only had one CPU simulated within it.

Keep in mind that this was many months ago when I was using an XP host with two physical cores. The CPU scheduler in XP doles out time slices in a round robin fashion... which means if the VM is maxed out, then each CPU is running at about 50%. The host was noticeably slower if I did not "dedicate" one physical core to the multiple VMs. Sure the host still could make requests of that same physical core. I did not work thru each process and force them to use the second physical core. Had I done that, then one physical core would have been dedicated to the VMs.

I realize that the OP is talking about a W7 host with an AMD CPU with 8 physical cores and that the W7 CPU scheduler is different than XP's... but, even within W7, you can "dedicate" a CPU to a VM. It might not be wise, but it can be done and might be best for some setups.

 

[carwiz]

Nope, sorry. Cores are NOT dedicated in VM. If that were the case, my Windows 7 would have stopped completely while I was running Windows 8 in VM since I assigned all eight cores at 100%. It didn't happen. Windows 7 was happily retrieving email, playing music through WMC and running IE-8 with info pages while I was browsing with IE-9 and experimenting with different settings on Windows 8 VM. And there were some file copies from Flash Drives in there too. I was running Eight in windows mode and flipping back and forth to read instructions about Windows 8 on Seven (host). I even had parts of Seven on my second display so I could watch processor activity and keep an eye on temps while watching for email. I should have saved the HWiNFO logs from that test to show you proof. As I recall, all four cores (eight threads) hit turbo at various times but never at same time (they don't anyway) and processor utilization never got above around 80%.

You can't compare a 2-core XP machine to an 8-core Windows 7 machine. It will get smoked every time.

 

[UsernameIssues]

Then what would you say the affinity setting does on the host os?

 

[carwiz]

Affinity "restricts" what cores a program can use on the host. Normally, the settings for all programs will indicate all cores are usable. If you reduce the cores or allow just one core, the program will run slower because all it's instructions have to be run by that core. If the core is busy, the program waits. Affinity does not dedicate a core to the program. The core can still be used by other programs and it will be used. The program that has a core affinity has to wait in line for the core.

The settings in VM are the same in that reducing the cores reduces the amount of work you're allowing the processor to do with the VM instructions. Lower cores means lower work paths and slower work. And if you lower the "Cap", you're further restricting the amount of work passed to the processor. There's no benefit in restricting execution to fewer cores. If there were, we'd all still have 286 processors.

If a core is available, use it!

 

[UsernameIssues]

As I mentioned, "I did not work thru each process and force them to use the second physical core. Had I done that, then one physical core would have been dedicated to the VMs." I was not attempting to dedicate as much as I was attempting to restrict. The only explanation that I have as to why the VMs performed their task just as well when restricted to one CPU as they did when given access to all CPUs is the task was highly repetitive - perhaps sticking with CPU1's cache made a difference.

Since the thread is about W7 hosts - I changed a VirtualBox W7pro64bit VM to use 4 CPUs and ran wPrime. Now the host is noticeably slower with all 4 of its CPUs maxed out. The host's mouse movements are jerky and the host's screen repaints crawl. I don't have a 64bit XP VM on this box or I would test that.

Thanks for your time on this. I don't want to hijack the thread. I'll leave it to those more knowledgeable than me to advise the OP on this setup.

 

[JoesMorgue]

Nope, sorry. Cores are NOT dedicated in VM. If that were the case, my Windows 7 would have stopped completely while I was running Windows 8 in VM since I assigned all eight cores at 100%. It didn't happen. Windows 7 was happily retrieving email, playing music through WMC and running IE-8 with info pages while I was browsing with IE-9 and experimenting with different settings on Windows 8 VM. And there were some file copies from Flash Drives in there too. I was running Eight in windows mode and flipping back and forth to read instructions about Windows 8 on Seven (host). I even had parts of Seven on my second display so I could watch processor activity and keep an eye on temps while watching for email. I should have saved the HWiNFO logs from that test to show you proof. As I recall, all four cores (eight threads) hit turbo at various times but never at same time (they don't anyway) and processor utilization never got above around 80%.

You can't compare a 2-core XP machine to an 8-core Windows 7 machine. It will get smoked every time.

Just because you assign it does not mean it will be used. When I first got this computer, I downloaded and ran a load test that put all 8 cores at 100% load. After watching it for a few minutes, I decided to see what would happen if I opened a browser window, and my surfing was just fine. I even did a youtube vid and that was smooth.

Like I said, After XP gives me the taskbar, core loads drop to almost zero if both OSs are running nothing else on the desktop

 

[AC]

I'd run it just like Indianatone said. 4Cores, 8GB of RAM. Both 7 and XP should be fast and stable.

 

[JoesMorgue]

I'd run it just like Indianatone said. 4Cores, 8GB of RAM. Both 7 and XP should be fast and stable.

That is understood. Right now, I'm debating about 4, 2, or 1 core, but this conversation has become [to me] more about the efficiencies of running it, and I'm trying to learn, so I keep asking and hoping to find somebody else that has looked into it.

 

[carwiz]

Since the thread is about W7 hosts - I changed a VirtualBox W7pro64bit VM to use 4 CPUs and ran wPrime. Now the host is noticeably slower with all 4 of its CPUs maxed out. The host's mouse movements are jerky and the host's screen repaints crawl.

I would expect so.