Does i7 make virtual pc's any faster?

jimbo45 · 25 Feb 2012

NoelDP said:

JUst as a FWIW, I'm running a Vista VM, and a Win7 VM at teh same time, under VBox, both with 1 GB RAM - the host is Win 7 running on a i3 370 with 8GB.
I could easily run another one or two VM's if I needed to, so long as none were using processor-intensive routines :)

It's a very pleasant change from a couple of weeks ago, when I only had 4GB, and was running into problems with disk-swapping all the time, if I had a few apps open.

Hi there

I think you've shown conclusively that my main supposition is that decent VM performance REQUIRES a decent amount of RAM on the Host machine as posted.

RAM is CHEAP these days (about the only thing that is !!) so don't put up with unnecessary poor performance.

BTW deciding how much RAM to allocate to a VM is quite tricky -- it's not an intuitive 1:1 relationship to what you would use if the VM were a REAL physical machine.

You can often have quite decent 1 GB VM's working where you would have had 2 or even 4 GB on it if it were a REAL machine.

Just trial and error. Note however if you are running WINDOWS VM's you might run into multiple re-activation problems if you change the RAM size too much so do this type of testing BEFORE activating Windows on the VM.

Cheers
jimbo

NoelDP · 25 Feb 2012

jimbo45 said:

Note however if you are running WINDOWS VM's you might run into multiple re-activation problems if you change the RAM size too much so do this type of testing BEFORE activating Windows on the VM.

Agreed.
For my purposes (mostly WGA troubleshooting) 1GB is quite enough, with the (2D is enough for me) graphics set to 64MB.
I would expect more problems with reactivation if you mess around with the Graphics, than with the RAM - especially if you're using an OEM license! I'm not sure how the VM sees the graphics in a VM, but if it's presented to the VM as part of the virtual motherboard, then it could even disallow changes by refusing to re-activate

Inigma · 25 Feb 2012

Thanks a lot for all the input! I may even be running 2 servers on this laptop. I am doing a course that simulates a real, small project. I haven't gotten around to planning this project out properly but I imagine one of my servers will be running DHCP, DNS, FTP, etc. Would those be considered cpu intensive at all? Also things like exchange will need to be setup.

jimbo45 · 25 Feb 2012

Hi there
All that stuff will run just fine on a laptop -- remember you aren't running 1000 clients on the server !!!!!!!.

It's a great method for learning how to manage servers as well.

Note when testing EXCHANGE / DNS etc it's sometimes better to try with a REMOTE laptop rather than have it all on the same LAN but for Course purposes running the Virtual server on a Host laptop is fine -- remember to use Bridged or Nat Networking so you've got proper Real World networking between Virtual Server and Host machine.

Good luck

Cheers

jimbo