Has anyone run a VM on current NetBook CPUs ("ATOM" etc) ?

[chtuc]

My plans are to purchase an XP Netbook rather than a Laptop or Notebook on which to load and run small VMs useful in my work..

But which ones have CPUs compatible with VM ???

Thanks for your answers.

[jimbo45]

The main consideration is the amount of RAM. On that CPU don't even THINK of installing a 64 bit guest -- wouldn't work anyway as the CPU has to be 64 bit and have VT enabled.

You could probably install a SMALL XP or Linux guest -- I wouldn't give the guest much more than 384MB even on a 1GB machine.

You won't get lightning fast performance either so don't try running Photoshop CS4 or a load of heavy EXCEL spreadsheets on a guest XP system on this laptop,

It WILL work however.

Cheers

jimbo

[chtuc]

Thanks for the comment. I use small footprint VM appliances (WIN98 and DOS!)

so that neither speed or memory are constraints. What I want to know, is simply

whether or not the low power processors used in net-books are true X86 machines

able to run VM ACE, Workstation or Player..

[wila]

Hi,

Yes it works fine. I run VMs on an atom based box which has ubuntu as main OS.

Works absolutely fine. As mentioned before make sure you have enough RAM, the more the merrier.

Also worth considerating is a fast disk system and do make sure your graphics card / chipset is supported for 3D if you want to run directX / 3D enabled applications.

--

Wil

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Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[joehecht]

Its not real fast, but it works. My Acer Aspire One has 1.5 gb memory, and a SD card with a readyboot cache.

It is running Vista x32 Ultimate as a Host, and I can run XP VM's (one at a time) with 640mb of ram allocated for the guest fairly well.

Ubuntu simply rocks as a guest.

I traded up to Vista as a host, as it seems to run a lot smoother than XP (even though it leaves less resources available for guests than XP).

Going to try Win7 (again), hoping the drivers for the touchscreen i cut in will work ok.

J

[depping]

I got a colleague actually running an XP vm on his netbook, works like a charm.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[casondave]

In keeping with the same idea ....

Does anyone know if you can use something like ESXi right on the Atom Netbook and skip a host OS?

Cheers'

Dave

[wila]

Hi,

You had better started a new topic. The time this thread was started the atom CPU processors where the 4 series, while we are now at the 5 series.

With the 4 series you could have a maximum of 2GB and NO VT. This means that even if you could get ESX/ESXi to boot, you could not really start a guest as there was no memory left.

Now with the 5 series the memory constraint is 4GB, There's hyperthreading (really) but there's still no VT.

I actually switched to a 5 series based motherboard for being able to run 2 reasonable VM's at the same time.

Yes I know crazy on such a low powered host, but it actually works nicely with workstation 7.1

Does ESXi work? Umm... I haven't tested it yet to be honest, but for sure you will not be able to start 64 bits guests (due to no VT support)

I might be crazy enough now to test as it is interesting to know Chances are not that big though that the chipsets are supported on my cheap Asus mobo and I'm already using the PCI slot for a slightly better graphics card.

Btw, you would want the atom D510 as that is the dual core processor which is a minimum for being able to get vSphere to run for a bit.

Hope this helps,

--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

Contributing author at blog www.planetvm.net

Twitter: @wilva