[thelist] has anyone used MS VPC (was RE: Multiple IE's: 6 and7)

[Ken Schaefer]

Probably not. You can run a Windows XP Guest with 256MB of RAM for basic
tasks - just like a physical machine.

The two biggest performance hurdles with VPC (or any virtualisation
technology) is:
a) disk I/O - if you are running VMs on a machine that's also running a host
OS, think about how much pressure you are putting on your disks. Disks are
already typically the slowest part of your machine and you're just putting
more load on them. This applies doubly in laptops. Consider getting more
spindles to alleviate this. A lot of business type notebooks allow you to add
an additional modular bay hard drive, and you can also get external 2.5"
bus-powered drives. FWIW I can 6 VPCs (5 x Windows Server, 1 x Windows XP)
off a recent Dual Core laptop when using two internal drives and an external
drive.

b) VPC Additions. The only version of VPC that supports hardware
virtualisation technologies (e.g. Intel VT) is VPC 2007 (which is currently
in Release Candidate). If you have an earlier version (i.e. VPC 2004) then
you need to install VPC Additions for any guest OS to allow virtualisation of
kernel-mode functionality. There are some Linux VM additions that are in
beta, and available from http://connect.microsoft.com - otherwise you'll get
poor performance (RAM or otherwise) simply because kernel functionality is
emulated, not virtualised.

Cheers
Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Paul Bennett
Sent: Friday, 19 January 2007 8:55 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] has anyone used MS VPC (was RE: Multiple IE's: 6 and7)

Installed and use Novell Linux (for site testing) fine using VPC, but
performance is slow on our test machine.
As with all the other posts, I imagine this is RAM-related.

Paul