[Cialug] Specs for a VM machine?

[David Champion]

Vmware player runs pretty smooth on my laptop, has the 2ghz Core2Duo and 
4gb of RAM. My host OS is Linux. I've mostly used it for booting other 
Linux distributions for testing.

I'd get as much RAM as your PC and / or OS will support. RAM is very 
cheap these days.

Most of the newer processors have the VTProc extensions, but be sure to 
check first. I was dissapointed to find out that my AMD X2 processor in 
my PC with a Socket939 does not support it.

I don't know that you "need" a Quad Core processor... but I've been 
doing some research on building a new PC for home, and some of the Intel 
Core2Quad processors are available for a very attractive price compared 
to the Core2Duo. One thing I'd beware of - some of the cheap package 
deals for the first generation AMD Phenom Quad Core processors look very 
attractive, but those processors had a bug in them... so hold out for 
one of the newer ones, or stick with the Intel processors.

I may have to try out the new VirtualBox that has the hardware 
acceleration support. I'm looking forward to the day when I can just run 
Windows games in a VM instead of having to reboot. From what I've heard, 
it isn't really there yet, but should be in the next year or so.

-dc

Todd Walton wrote:
> Liftoff!  I successfully booted an existing Windows installation from
> within Linux, using VirtualBox.  Well, I didn't get all the way to the
> desktop because it was *slow*.  But regardless, I'm as pleased as a
> pig in... underwear.
>
> So, I'm thinking about building a new computer in a month or two.
> Right now I'm running an Athlon 1GHz with 1GB of RAM.  I'd like
> something with about 2 or 3 times the amount of RAM, and a faster
> processor.
>
> Question: In what way does the processor matter to running virtual
> machines?  I'll get a multi-core with virtualization support, that's a
> given.  But should I go for quad core and as fast as I can afford it?
> Or could I save a few bucks on the processor to spend on, say, a
> better video card?
>
> -todd
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