[TriLUG] VirtualBox?

[Kevin Hunter]

At 12:04am -0400 on Fri, 02 Oct 2009, Charles Fischer wrote:
> Has anybody used VirtualBox?  I want to run Fedora and Windows 7 on a P4 
> 3.2GHz with 2GB memory.  Host OS will be Windows 7 and guest OS Linux.  
> Am I out of my mind, or will this work well?

Frickin' love VirtualBox.  I can't speak to the Windows 7 bit, but I run 
WinXP and many *nix distros inside VBox regularly, on an Ubuntu host.

I /can/ speak to two things, however: memory and hardware virtualization.

1. Memory.  You want memory.  Lots of it.  (We are now at the 6GB/$100 
threshold, so you have little excuse.)

What's the minimum for Win7?  I know that Vista does not play well with 
anything less than a gig, 2 in any normal circumstance of which I'm 
aware.  If Win7 is anything like Vista (and all accounts I've read 
suggest that it is), you will want to at least half again the memory you 
have for Win7 + virtual machines.

2. VMX/SVM - hardware virtualization

You may get "fast enough" performance for your needs, but you can get 
near-native performance in the guest OS if you have hardware 
virtualization help.  That is, if the following command returns something

$ grep -Ei "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo

I don't believe the P4 has the virtualization bit, but my memory is 
rusty in these matters.  (Briefly and roughly, VMX is the Intel flag on 
the CPU for virtualization and SVM is AMD's version of it.)

Of course, for administration, (if you ever need to do it, har har) my 
suggestion is to go with *nix as a host and Win as the guest.  Assuming 
you're facile with the command line, you'll have a *much* easier time 
with the tools that *nix systems afford you.

Cheers,

Kevin