How much RAM for a VM?

philjayj · 18 Jul 2008 at 23:58

Hi

I have just built a system which is made up of 8GB of DDR2 RAM and an Intel Q6600. The machine will be used to run four virtual machines and I am just wondering how much RAM i should allocate to each VM and how much to the host OS - if anyone has any suggestions, it would be appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

blackninja · 19 Jul 2008 at 00:34

I have a question for U; How long is a piece of string?

Have you used VMs before? That is a serious question .... you should already know what you are getting into if you feel you need that spec ...

A VM will require as much RAM as it needs .. fire em up and see what they take with the stuff that you have on em and go just above it. you wil soon know if you have overdone it!

PhoenixUK · 19 Jul 2008 at 01:22

I would prefer giving at least 1gb to each and having minimum of 2gb on main machine.
But that really depends what VMs exactly and what will they do.

some linux machines just running basic servers will do even with 256.

philjayj · 19 Jul 2008 at 08:47

Thanks for the replies guys, I'll give both a shot.

IAmATeaf · 19 Jul 2008 at 11:53

Really depends what the VM is doing and running TBH. If it's just a Windows 2003 Server with nothing else running then in theory you can get away with giving it only 384mb of RAM.