3
I own a Thinkpad T420s with 8GB RAM, 160 GB SSD and a quite fast i7 processor. Summa summarum a very fast computer that works perfectly. Now, I am not very impressed by the performance of my Ubuntu 12.04 virtual machine running on VirtualBox 4.1.18. I assume that Virtual Machines are always a bit slower than the guest system, still I think it should be more performant given the hardware settings I give it:
4096 MB RAM
1 CPU without CPU limitation (I would like to give it more but then it does not seem to work - I am not experienced in this maybe somebody could give me advice on this too)
Activated PAE/NX, VT-x/AMD-V and Nested Paging
96 MB Graphics Memory (no 2D or 3D acceleration)
~ 14 GB disk space, currently about 7 GB are used
EDIT: Guest additions installed
Maybe I misconfigured something, could you give me a hint please? Thanks!
Edit: What I mean by slow is that for example switching tabs in the browser (whether FF or Chrome) only goes with a 0.5s delay or something, as well as switching application windows and/or double-clicking applications in the dock to get all open windows.. opening Aptana takes about a minute whereas opening something like Photoshop on the guest system takes 5 seconds
Free VMWare vSphare Hypervisor,
Free Citrix XenServer,
Open-source Xen for Linux,
Open-source KVM for Linux.
Hey, thanks for your exhaustive answer. The thing is, I do not really want to reinstall Ubuntu or another guest system, and do not want to switch my host system either. If I had spare time or would be setting up a completely new work place, that would be an option. Might come in handy for other users though, thanks! – wnstnsmth – 2012-10-02T05:34:15.507
I'd still suggest trying VMWare instead, I run Ubuntu VMs on my Win7 in VMWare Player without issue. Single CPU, 1GB, and it runs Lubuntu fine. I'm sure if you put 4CPU + 4GB it would run fine (though your host machine may slow down).
I'd also suggest isolating the CPUs you are using. Set the CPU affinity on your VMs to say CPU5-8, and set the affinity on your heavy apps to CPU 1-4. Run some perfmon on your CPUs to see what happens when under heavier load. – sonjz – 2012-10-03T00:44:19.143