Quantity of VMs in a PC

[liwing]

How many VMPlayers can i run in a PC with an i5 2500k and 16gb ram, assuming each VM will have 1gb ram, running winxp and some other application as heavy as a game (so that it gets near 95% of ram usage) ? And what if is 2gb allocated for the VMs ? Does HDs have influence? If so, i have 4 7200 rpm HDs. Thank you.

[liwing]

I would also like to know much a CPU weighs in the performance, assuming i will not be running so cpu-intensive applications, and when it would be a limiting factor.

So, theoretically, with 16gb ram, i can run 14 VM's with 1gb ram allocated to them. That CPU can support that?. And what if my pc had 32gb ram?

[weinstein5]

Theoretically 14 might be a good number but VM player is not designed to host multiple VMs simultaneaously - my estimation to get that many VMs running they would have to be idle - you will definitly hit an issue with CPU contention running that many VMs even if you added memory -

[liwing]

So, i could probably run 7 then?

[weinstein5]

Yes but I would not hold my breath for good performance - 

[hbato · Accepted solution]

There could and most probably will be a bottleneck at your CPU (i5 2500k = 4 cores = 4 threads) that may cause significant performance decrease if you run 7 vm's.

Regards, Harold

[liwing]

I see, I think i'll have just to test myself, thanks for the information.

Ah, let me ask one more thing, its cause i still dont have that pc, im going to build it in a few weeks. So i cant test now.

So, what if i gave 14gb to the VM, and almost all cores to it, and i ran 9± instances of my program ?

[hbato]

I think it would depend on how much CPU or Memory demanding your application would be. My estimate would be ~7 instance if it is CPU hog.

Regards, Harold

[continuum]

it also depends on the host OS
with a new Linux with latest kernels or a 2008 R2 hosts you can not run as many VMs as with older host OS

also if you run VMplayer 4 you can run less VMs than with VMplayer 3

[liwing]

Thanks for all the information.