which cpu for virtualbox?

[clone768]

is the i5-3320M a reasonable cpu to run 3-4 vms simultaneously, or should i give more money

[Perryg]

Depends on what the guests are going to be doing and what OS the guests are.

[clone768]

The guests will mostly be linux and windows.

It will be nice if I would be able to e.g. watch videos with a reasonable ease inside the vms.

I will use them to test how well different applications work together within a specific os. Running 3-4 vms concurrently will also be nice for making presentations to customers.

[Perryg]

Running videos in a guest is about the most intensive thing that can be done in a guest. The processor you list has 2 cores and if you intend to run 4 guests like this you should have as many cores+1 for the host. I would also have an ample amount of memory, but even then it may not play as well as you would like.

[clone768]

The i5-3320M system will take 16GB RAM max. Also this cpu has Hyper-Threading.

Still you don't think I'll be able to watch youtube videos within the VMs?

Should i definitely get a QM cpu? The i7-3720QM would be my next option money wise

[Perryg]

I didn't mention hyper-threading for a reason. Not good in any virtual environment.

i5 isn't bad just get one with 5 or 6 cores. if it is available. VT-d and EPT will really help too and of course VT-x goes without saying.

[clone768]

Thx, i didn't know that about Hyper-Threading

The processors I'm thinking about are M(mobile). Can get only up to 4 cores afaik! The thing is I have to do VM work while I'm away.

[Perryg]

4 cores it is then. just give the guests 1 core each and keep an eye on it. Hopefully you will not be running video in all of the guests at the same time.

[clone768]

Does it matter if I use Linux as host OS? Will that make it easier to run more than one VM on the same core in the case of a dual core cpu?

[mpack]

What matters is the resources available (e.g. RAM, disk space, CPU cores), not the host OS.