[Sat, 14 May 2016 11:35:53 +0000] Albin Otterhäll <gmane@otterhall.com> wrote: > Martin Read: > > On 14/05/16 10:05, Albin Otterhäll wrote: > >> I want to use virtual machines for my everyday work on my laptop > >> (with a Intel Core i5-3320M @ 2.60 GHz * 4 and 16GB RAM), using > >> KVM on Debian as my hypervisor. > >> > >> But I can't find any general guidelines for how much system > >> resources to "give" to a VM. How many logical cores? How much RAM? > >> Note that the primary OS only should act as a hypervisor. [...] Well, the good thing about virtual machines is that you do not need to really decide this now. Just start with a value you consider useful now and later add more virtual memory and virtual CPU cores. For Windows, I'd generally recommend you to expose 4 virtual cores and 6 GiB of RAM, for Linux, I'd go for 4 virtual cores and 4 GiB of RAM. Apart from the applications you run, it highly depends on the number of virtual machines running simultaneously. If you only ever run one of them at once, give all your RAM minus about 1 GiB to them. If you run some in parallel, distribute your RAM over them (If you use memory ballooning, you can overcommit carefully). For Windows, I usually give a bit more RAM than Linux, but it also depends on what you do inside the VM. On your system, I'd minimally assign 2 GiB for Linux and 3 GiB for Windows (if you intend to run more than two VMs at once). Should you only want to run one Windows and one Linux VM, you might as well give 7 GiB to Linux and 8 to Windows and adjust as necessary later. Normally, you can give each VM all of your CPU cores. This will result in all VMs being able to access the whole computing power and if two VMs try to access all cores at the same time, they will be scheduled similar to processes in the OS. As you can see: There is no clear recommendation -- just try out a few configurations and settle for what works best :) HTH Linux-Fan -- http://masysma.lima-city.de/
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