virtualbox.org

Hi!

I want to find out what is the best solution for multiple Win XP guests. I just tried to set up guests on W7 host with my hardware and the result was 14 XP VMs, but my target is 20 VMs The main problem is CPU, when every VM gets at least 7-10% from host CPU, it begins to freeze. I worked with win OS only before, so looking for any idea - using Linux\Ubuntu will give productivity gain or not?

I thinnk you must get the hardware capable to your goal. There is no software trick to make it better.

stefan.becker wrote:I thinnk you must get the hardware capable to your goal. There is no software trick to make it better.

True. At the same time, different operating systems handle resource scarcity better than others. Many commercial Unix distributions over the past 20 years ended up in front of paying customers who demanded stability as they replaced their mainframe MVS and VSE installations. Therefore, more stability was baked in. Some cutting edge Linux distributions go the other direction, focusing instead on packing many features into the OS. Windows historically has focused on the operator experience at the expense of stability and scalability. All operating systems fall somewhere in between the extremes.

Granted, with sufficient resources most operating systems can cope. They operating systems start to show their differences under resource allocation conflicts.

To the original poster: you might try different operating systems and set up some controlled tests. While I have little experience with Red Hat, I would not be surprised to learn that Red Hat generally does very well as an operating system for virtualizing OS instances. You might want to focus on operating systems that tend to be deployed in servers rather than workstations.

Good luck and please circle back to this thread to let the community know what you learned.

Thanks, but could you give any direction where to find information about most suitable OS for virtualization, may be compare Red Hat with any other?

Johnyman wrote:Thanks, but could you give any direction where to find information about most suitable OS for virtualization, may be compare Red Hat with any other?

I suspect this field is evolving so fast that good information is hard to find, and probably invalid by the time it is published. Most operating systems are free to evaluate. Set up some benchmarks and spend a few days testing.

Now that I think about it, you could provide information for the next guy trying to answer this question.

My 2 cents,

You really have 3 Linux base choices. Debian, RPM (redhat), or Solaris. As for which is better that is always in the eye of the beholder. Just select one that you can deal with and learn how to make it fit your needs. I would suggest that you run a server-only if at all possible to save as much overhead as you can, especially since you don't need the host for anything except to run the hypervisor (nor should you with this much load).

I know one thing that might be of help and that is I run VirtualBox on all of the above platforms and find that the Debian format works better and has fewer issues than the others. Just do a net install and only select the base. You can add the necessary dependencies later.