6Gb RAM enough on machine running Win7 x2 ?

[Guermantes]

Hello,

I am a web designer and I need to be able to test sites in various operating systems and with different configurations. I am thinking of a getting VMWare and use virtual machines to test my sites in.

The system I am buying in a couple of weeks has: a i7 950 3GHz with 6Gb DDR3 triple channel 1600 Hz RAM, with Radeon 5850 1Gb. It is running Windows 7 64 bit.

Is this system capable of "loading and working inside" a virtual machine (Linux Ubuntu, Win 7, and Win XP; one at a time of course)?

Or do I really really really need to get more RAM (which would mean another 6Gb in order to retain triple channel mode).

Thanks a lot!

[piaroa · Accepted solution]

Yeah, that looks like a really powerful host for Workstation. You can power on and use more than 1 VM concurrently actually (depending on load, services).

You should be ok to run Linux, Windows and any other supported guest OS'. You "could" see a bottleneck in IO if you have your VMs writing or reading to disk too much, but that's under very heavy load.

Make sure to configure your VMs as low spec'ed as you can, and work your way up (start with 1GB, 1vCPU, etc).

If this post has been helpful/solved your issue, please mark the thread and award points as you see fit. Thanks!

[Lawrence]

If you set up your guest VMs with reasonable (to low) RAM, then you should be fine.

realize you have your Host OS RAM requirement, then your VMs plus their overhead (video RAM, etc)

So is 6GB enough? sorry to say it depends on your VMs.

Also, from a performance perspective (for those new to virtualization) - be careful of how many VMs you place / HD spindle

- if using an SSD - then usually much less an issue

- pre-SSD I always ran my Host OS on a seperate HD from my guests (and had a huge performance increase for doing so).

- my new System (which runs Win7 64-bit), I only run WS at the host (regular HD), then my VMs on SSD or WD 10k Raptor drive.

If this post has been helpful/solved your issue, please mark the thread and award points as you see fit. Thanks!

[Lawrence]

If you set up your guest VMs with reasonable (to low) RAM, then you should be fine.

realize you have your Host OS RAM requirement, then your VMs plus their overhead (video RAM, etc)

So is 6GB enough? sorry to say it depends on your VMs.

Also, from a performance perspective (for those new to virtualization) - be careful of how many VMs you place / HD spindle

- if using an SSD - then usually much less an issue

- pre-SSD I always ran my Host OS on a seperate HD from my guests (and had a huge performance increase for doing so).

- my new System (which runs Win7 64-bit), I only run WS at the host (regular HD), then my VMs on SSD or WD 10k Raptor drive.

If this post has been helpful/solved your issue, please mark the thread and award points as you see fit. Thanks!

[Lawrence]

If you set up your guest VMs with reasonable (to low) RAM, then you should be fine.

realize you have your Host OS RAM requirement, then your VMs plus their overhead (video RAM, etc)

So is 6GB enough? sorry to say it depends on your VMs.

If you gave each VM 1GB of RAM, and your weren't using a lot of RAM at the host level, you could run all the VMs at the same time.

Also, from a performance perspective (for those new to virtualization) - be careful of how many VMs you place / HD spindle

- if using an SSD - then usually much less an issue

- pre-SSD I always ran my Host OS on a seperate HD from my guests (and had a huge performance increase for doing so).

- my new System (which runs Win7 64-bit), I only run WS at the host (regular HD), then my VMs on SSD or WD 10k Raptor drive.

If this post has been helpful/solved your issue, please mark the thread and award points as you see fit. Thanks!