I would like to have a Linux guest on a Windows host, where both the guest and host can at times, but not always, have computationally intensive workloads. The host has a fairly new processor with 6 cores/12 threads. I'm trying to understand how many CPUs I can assign to a guest in VMware Workstation while keeping both the host and guest reasonably responsive when either is under a high load.
In the past I've used VirtualBox and Hyper-V for this type of workload.
Using VirtualBox on an older Core 2 system, the guest system would frequently crash if assigned a number of CPUs equal to the number of cores on the host. So in practice I would assign half the cores to the guest (i.e., 2 cores on a 4 core/8 thread CPU) and it would work, which is an unfortunate limitation for what I wanted to do. Furthermore, if I had a CPU load equal to the number of virtual processors I assigned, multitasking performance on the guest was horrible.
For two years I've been using Hyper-V on a 4 core/8 thread system, assigning 4 cores to the guest works just fine. I can fully load guest and/or host, and both are reasonably responsive (like what you'd expect without virtualization under a similar work load). I haven't tried increasing the allocation to take advantage of hyper-threading. But Hyper-V has GUI issues for a guest system, so I've been considering at VMware Workstation.
Since Workstation is a Type 2 hypervisor, I'd expect the behavior to be similar to my VirtualBox experience, but maybe someone can tell me otherwise. Most of the recommendations I've seen tend to emphasize using the fewest number of processors, which is the opposite of what I want to do.
So does anyone have any experience/knowledge of this type of situation? Can I assign the guest 6 or even 12 cores and have it and the host behave reasonably if I fully load it or the host, or do I have to allocate fewer cores? By "reasonable" I of course mean slowdowns and responsiveness similar to what you would expect with that type of load without virtualization (for example, if I run 6 CPU intensive jobs, I can tell the system is slower but I can still work on the system without difficulty).
Thanks.
