Stupid virtual machine tricks

There is an application that have been waiting on and really want to use, well, at least I think I do. Then the vendor told me it required a 64 bit Windows OS with at least 8 gb of RAM. I was expecting to run it on a Linux, Solaris or Mac server and just be able to access it from my MacBook in an X Window. So now Im wondering if I can put it in an XP64 virtual machine and put that on the Linux/Solaris/Mac server and access that from my MacBook while I travel. Is there a limit on the amount of RAM you can access through VM ware? One of our more savvy IT guys told me it was 4 gb. Does the virtualization software that runs under Solaris let you see more RAM? Should I buy a Dell Workstation notebook with 8 gb (ack!). Thanks for any suggestions or info.

Well, 4GB is the most accessible by 32-bit XP, and I suspect that the 4gb limit you mention is really a reflection of 32-bit memory addressing used by the VM software.

Those minimum specs are pretty extreme. Are we talking about ProE or something of that nature?

GadgetFreak,

You may wish to take a look at VirtualBox, a free virtualization program from Sun, which is similar to VMWare and Parallels. It has the ability to run a VM in headless mode. So in a UNIX shell, you type something like:

VBoxHeadless -startvm WinXP64 -vrdp=off

and then connect to the Win XP instance over RDP with Microsoft's RDP client on your Mac. This is much nicer and more efficient than using X. You even get excellent sound support!

If you type the above command under an instance of the program "screen", you don't even need to stay logged into the host OS.

The only thing I am not certain about is whether it can allocate 8GB of RAM to your VM. VirtualBox is actively developed, and even if it does not have this capability yet, I am sure it will have it soon.

http://www.virtualbox.org

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html

I run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my mbp on an almost daily basis,, but I do not know if it can handle 8GB of memory. You would have to try that out, or maybe look to see if they have it documented somewhere as to how much memory Fusion can support.

How much RAM do you have on these servers? I wouldn't recommend creating a VM with more RAM than the host computer has. I don't think it's really possible, and is definitely not smart. I have enough issues with VMs allocated 1/2 of the RAM of my machine.

Fusion 2.0 supports 8GB per VM, I have not tried to allocate that to a VM when not having the physical memory. VMWare Workstation (PC side) DOES allow the VM to page memory to disk if you allocate a size greater, but it can be dog slow and cause thrasing on the host due to limited physical memory.

I'm assuming you don't have Fusion 2.0?

Thanks. This has been very useful. I have also been researching around and it looks as mentioned above that Workstation and Fusion can both do 8 gb. Virtual Box was one I was trying to think of but couldnt remember the name of so that was extremely helpful. I havent been able to find the memory specs of Virtual Box though. Our IT people are helping me as of today. The practical hints like not assigning more than half of the machine memory are very useful. The current Linux box we are thinking of trying it on has 64 gb RAM and the Mac has 16 GB. The Solaris has 256 GB of RAM although we beat that pretty hard and sometimes run out of memory while the Linux machine and Mac are underutilized. We could always dedicate a linux box with 64 gb of RAM to this to allow multiple 8 gb virtual machines based on the comments above that might make sense. I just hate to sink that much money in a Windows machine for just this app which is why I really am interested in the virtual machine aspect. Thanks again.