MacBook Pro 13" and VM's

zetec452 · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:44

Hey,

I'm considering purchasing a new laptop to replace my aging desktop pc and a very old laptop. My desktop PC currently has 4 GB ram and runs a few virtual machines for testing etc.

Is anyone running a few VM's on a macbook? If so how do you find it? My biggest concern is the slower hard drive compared to my pc. I don't meed mega fast VM performance but would like the ability to run 4-5 VM's.

Do you think the macbook pro 13" will see the i series CPU's anytime soon?

Thanks,

Jon

randal · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:51

I run VMWare Fusion on OSX, 4GB of RAM. XP flies, not tested Vista/7 yet mind.

Probably worth mentioning but VMWare Player on my work lappy struggles with 2 OSs running (Linux Host, XP guest), which I'm putting down to the 5400rpm drive. I reckon disk will be your bottleneck.

Space Cowboy · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:51

Just get as much RAM as you can afford/fit. I run a Windows VM regularly on 4GB and wish I could fit another 4GB.

zetec452 · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:55

Cool, I'd probably get 8GB Ram. My VMs are mainly 2003 server and XP although I will be using 2008 and W7 VMs soon.

Do you think the slower CPU will be a concern?

Jon

whitecrook · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:56

I've a 8GB i7 MBP pro and have been running MacOSX, vmware fusion running My bootcamp Win7 partition and a Ubuntu 10.04 install simultaneously in separate spaces, with an RDP to my various work station in my 4th space. Running photoshop, garageband, iphoto tons of tabs in safari, playing mame games in the bootcamp, and no problems at all , didn't even run out of memory, only used about 80%. Super responsive, was bloody impressive actually. One of the neat thing is when you plug a usb in fusion asks you which vm or host you want to connect the drive to. It's superbly integrated.

zetec452 · 23 Aug 2010 at 18:57

Thanks for the info.

whitecrook · 23 Aug 2010 at 19:00

JonRohan said:
Sounds good whitecrook. I think the slower laptop hard disk speed will be offset by the better caching and memory management in OSX.

I got the 500GB 5400 drive. I don't really feel it limits what I can do, and I can't hear it. The plan was/is to upgrade to a SSD when 500GB (or 512GB) disks become sensible. I can get 7+ hours of battery life out of my machine (obviously not when running honking great vm / garagband sessions)