Thursday, February 14, 2008

Mardi Gras, Cold and Virtual Machines

I took a break from posting so I could enjoy Mardi Gras. I have also been fighting a cold but had the energy to test a few things out.

I installed VMware and Virtual Box. Based on some limited tinkering I like Virtual Box better because it is pretty intuitive to use (no I did not read the manual :>). I really like the feature allowing you to use a downloaded ISO image without having to burn the image onto a CD/DVD. You can create a virtual drive and install the ISO image on the drive very easily.

I ran a few distributions like DSL and SME Server in Virtual Box and I was able to see an immediate impact on system resources by watching the system monitor in Ubuntu 7.10 on my test computer system I named "Mule".

Based on this I guess I am going to need a pretty beefy processor and lots of memory. I keep hearing running two virtual machines per processor core is the general rule of thumb. Quad core is looking pretty good or two separate dual core machines? I am guessing my starting point for memory is going to be 4 Gigabytes and a motherboard with four ram slots at a minimum.

Form following function?

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