PAE/NX AMD-V with multiple VMs

xnaud · Post by **xnaud** » 9. Feb 2009, 22:22

I need to run 2VMs to do my work: 1 for development on linux and 1 with XP

I cannot use PAE or AMD-V when my 2 VMs are running. Is there any plan to allow this soon?

Right now, the performance are not very good without hardware accelaration and I really need those VMs (being a consultant, i need to switch between VMs when developing for several clietns).

Thanks

Xav

Post by **sej7278** » 9. Feb 2009, 23:51

you're doing something wrong then as pae+nx+vtx work fine as long as all your running guests have them enabled - if you start one with it disabled, then the rest will be disabled too.

performance is about as good as it gets for a non-hypervisor virtualisation system.

xp is not a great guest, especially in 64-bit mode, try win2003, also some linuxes can suffer from high cpu usage if they have tickless (100hz?) kernels.

Post by **TerryE** » 10. Feb 2009, 02:20

sej7278, +1 on the issues with tickless kernels, but this is not the same thing as 100Hz kernels. In general the lower the tick the better in a VM, since the real time critical device handing is done in the Hosts device drivers anyway.

xnaud · Post by **xnaud** » 10. Feb 2009, 03:36

You are right. I can use now PAE or AMD-V with 2 running VMs. One of my VM has not the option selected.
The perf on my XP VM is ok. Although i am using it only for Office work (Word/Excel and Outlook) - Waiting for Open Office to be more user friendly

Now my Tomcat on linux starts twice faster so quicker dev cycles.

Thanks for your help.

Xav