Vbox - woes

[mickeyj4j]

Hi i am a long time user of virtual box host on both windows and linux. since i got A Macbook Pro late October 2011 model I have not had much success with vbox.

Device: Macbook Pro 13", Late 2011
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
Software: OSX 10.8 with latest updates.
Vbox: Latest version for mac

My usual setup is to run Vbox with half the ram available. on windows and linux hosts i have used 1gb, 2gb, for vbox and it works ok. on my mac host i have tested both 1gb and 2gb,

What I find is that vbox seems to run slow. no matter what guest os is run. When i use 1gb or 2gb it freezes out after a while and i have to crash the computer.

I have been told that i need to get 8gb of ram so i can run 4gb for the host and 4gb for the guest. what i want to know is what the minimum recommended setup is for osx host setup. and anyother things i need to do. to have vbox working at its best.

[mpack]

A generic discussion would be rather pointless, and go nowhere. Be specific about your VM and your precise issue, and provide a VM log file.

[dmaddent]

A generic discussion would be rather pointless, and go nowhere. Be specific about your VM and your precise issue, and provide a VM log file.

I actually would love to hear what people have to say about this issue.

[aglasser]

Hi i am a long time user of virtual box host on both windows and linux. since i got A Macbook Pro late October 2011 model I have not had much success with vbox.

Device: Macbook Pro 13", Late 2011
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
Software: OSX 10.8 with latest updates.
Vbox: Latest version for mac

My usual setup is to run Vbox with half the ram available. on windows and linux hosts i have used 1gb, 2gb, for vbox and it works ok. on my mac host i have tested both 1gb and 2gb,

What I find is that vbox seems to run slow. no matter what guest os is run. When i use 1gb or 2gb it freezes out after a while and i have to crash the computer.

I have been told that i need to get 8gb of ram so i can run 4gb for the host and 4gb for the guest. what i want to know is what the minimum recommended setup is for osx host setup. and anyother things i need to do. to have vbox working at its best.

I have used Vbox on an i7 MacBook Pro (8GB RAM) and an i5 MacBook Pro (4GB RAM) and can attest to the fact that the 4GB machine is unusable when running Virtualbox. Not even just the VM - if I allot 2GB (half of my resources) to a Windows 7 VM, it won't even boot half of the time (and other applications won't load for minutes). On the 8GB machine, it is snappy, even with only 2GB allocated to the VM. I assume this has to do with the host only having 2GB left for the system and other applications, making the host lag (and therefore the VM as well). Allocating 1GB to a Windows 7 VM is unbearably slow, but will boot.

Edit: My point here is to give the machine more RAM. Unfortunately, 4GB RAM on a Mac host is not practical to run Virtualbox, regardless of what any system requirement document may say.

[mpack]

4GB RAM is perfectly adequate for running VirtualBox. It may however not be adequate for running two or more (i.e. host+guest) 64bit OS's at the same time. A 32bit guest might be ok. The number of cores available is also relevant: basically I would not start by allocating just one core to the VM, see where I am from there.

Sometimes what the user sees as poor performance is actually just :-

• slow graphics - ensuring that the GAs are really installed will usually fix that.
• some network problem - with lots retries hogging the network. Making sure the network config is correct should fix that.