Multiple VMs

[MarkHolbrook]

Hi All,

For those of you with MacBook Pro units and 4gb of RAM are you able to open and use two WinXP VMs at the same time provided the memory in each is kept reasonable?

I'm finding a need for this in my work. I would love to know how well it works for some of you and what the performance seems like. Does Mac OS X still function for things like email, firefox?

Mark

[admin]

For those of you with MacBook Pro units and 4gb of RAM are you able to open and use two WinXP VMs at the same time provided the memory in each is kept reasonable?

I don't have this exact setup, but I do regularly run multiple virtual machines on a Mac Pro with 2 GB of RAM (one Ubuntu VM, one XP VM). I have Mail, Firefox, Terminal, and X11 open all the time.

Since RAM is probably the bottleneck, you should be fine. I would start with 1GB or less each, and XP doesn't need that much anyway.

[rcardona2k]

Works fine me with two XPs (Fusion + Bootcamp partition), or XP and Ubuntu using Spaces. With enough RAM, OS X is fine too (always keep Mail and Safari up)

[nathanp]

Hi All,

For those of you with MacBook Pro units and 4gb of RAM are you able to open and use two WinXP VMs at the same time provided the memory in each is kept reasonable?

I'm finding a need for this in my work. I would love to know how well it works for some of you and what the performance seems like. Does Mac OS X still function for things like email, firefox?

Mark

I keep the memory usage reasonable in the VMs and have no problem running more than two WinXP VMs at the same time. I've actually had 3 open, Fedora web server and one of them with a game running. Mac OSX was web browsing, etc.

I only have 3 GB of physical RAM.

[Pat_Lee]

On my 2 GB MacBook Pro, I demo two XP VMs (one Boot Camp, one virtual disk) and launch Mac apps with only a little impact. With 4GB of RAM, you should be fine. I would recommend 512 MB per XP VM in your case with few if any problems.

In terms of the maximum number of VMs, our system test team does stress tests on Mac Pros with tons of RAM and runs over 20 VMs at a time in torture tests to make sure we are shipping stable products.

Pat

[Bob_Zimmerman]

My MacBook has 2 GB of RAM, and I've been able to run five VMs simultaneously. Two of them were Linux boxes with 128 MB of RAM, two were Windows machines with 256, and one was another Linux box with 384.

4 GB of RAM should be enough to run quite a few VMs at once. Unless you're doing something that actually needs it, I wouldn't give Windows more than 512 MB of RAM. OS X normally runs pretty well as long as you reserve at least 768 MB for it.