How big is your VB server? How many VMs?

[Brutalizer]

I wonder how big is your VB server, and how many VMs are you running? Like, is there anyone running 100s of VMs on 512MB RAM server? How is your performance, any issues?

[frank]

I doubt that anybody will run many VMs on a server with only 512MB RAM. Each VM induces an overhead, so even if the guest would only use 16MB, the VM process would probably require 25-30MB RAM in that case. And a guest with 16MB does normally not make much sense. Modern Linux distributions require 1-2GB of RAM. If you use a stripped-down system you still would require at least 128MB per guest.

[scottgus1]

What you wanna bet it was really 512GB?

[mpack]

That was my assumption, and also that the question best translates into "how long is a piece of string".

[martyscholes]

I wonder how big is your VB server, and how many VMs are you running? Like, is there anyone running 100s of VMs on 512MB RAM server? How is your performance, any issues?

Ours is much smaller, but is for personal use. It has 60GB of RAM and typically runs about 8 virtual machines. Six are running as I type this. We don't use VB for servers, but to serve desktop operating systems through thin clients. A user can start and stop VB instances with the same effort as starting a word processor or web browser. This weekend we upgraded from dual-core Opterons to six-core Opterons and it made a HUGE difference, probably because of the later virtualization extensions.