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by DeepDuh 4845 days ago
While I share your sentiment I'm honestly kind of impressed that you run 5-6 linux VMs on a Pentium 4/AMD64 generation system. Really? Those things didn't virtualization support on the CPU yet, did they? Also, Ram probably maxes out at around 4GB which is quite low for an updated winXP with so many instances. Does that really run smoothly? I recommend you get an i5, 16GB, 500GB SSD and then come back and tell me the upgrade wasn't worth it ;-).
2 comments
ghshephard 4844 days ago
Always two (2) Linux instances (One CentOS and One Ubuntu), and almost always 4 OpenBSD images (for networking simulations). The VMware instances don't really seem to cause any foreground processing pauses (unlike the Craptastic VMware Workstation on my MacBook Pro + WIndows XP which leaves me in constant jerk-spinning beachball state. Grr...) - Runs super smoothly.

I do all my interactive work on a (Circa 2010) Macbook Air - the Windows XP system is for Visio, Dynamips, Vmware Workstation, PowerPoint, Visio, Microsoft Word, and Outlook+Lookout (I have 10 years of Exchange PST's cached on that box) - I don't think a faster system would give me much more than 10% improvement in performance - because I'm never really CPU bound on that box. And, honestly, I spend maybe an hour a day on it - the other seven I spend on my MacBook Air. I just don't see any justification to upgrade it. It gets the job done, and it's fast enough.

With all that said - the upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro to my SSD based 2010 MacBook Air was an awesome performance jump. Totally worth it. CPUs may not make much of a difference but WOW, do SSDs in a MacBook rock your world!

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drucken 4845 days ago
Vmware Workstation was first released in 1999. It never used to require hardware virtualization support until recently.

Also, 4GB is plenty for Windows XP. Perhaps you have not used it for so long now that you've forgotten, but it only ever required 64MB and ran perfectly fine with 128MB-256MB even with high performance apps. All that has happened since is a factor increase in memory requirement for a limited set of applications.

With Linux guest instances, it is easy to cap and keep very low the maximum memory usage. 6x VM with 256MB each is still only 1.5GB.

Without a change in software requirements, I doubt many consumers would feel the need to upgrade anything. CPUs/PCs really have been fast enough for many years now.

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DeepDuh 4845 days ago
Did you also update your XP to the latest service packs and patches? My updated XP in a VM currently runs at 780MB after one morning of very light usage. It has only one application open at 100MB.

Also, yes, virtualization wasn't always needed, but without it anything slightly CPU intensive will be awfully slow. I can see it working for CLI-only linux/bsd systems, but not much else. Do you ever compile something bigger on your guest systems as an example?

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