How many VM's can you run in VMware Workstation 8
Transcript
hi again and this is Keith Townsen from the virtualized geek.com we're going to take a look at a pretty simple lab today but it will answer a lot of questions that I get offline about how many virtual machines you can run on a single uh laptop within your lab so we'll take a look at my lab I have a Dell SPS 15 the model from last year is a l50 x uh it has an Intel i7 2630 processor which runs at 2 GHz I have upgraded
the machine to 16 GB of RAM it has a 750 gig hard drive that runs at 7200 RPM so we'll look take a look and see what type of performance we can get out of this machine the first thing we'll look at is how much memory we're taking up prior to running any virtual machines if you see right now CPU is uh running between 7 and 11% and we're currently using 3.33 GB of the available Ram so the first thing that we did was create clones
of a XP image that I had created earlier we created link clones clones 1 through 10 currently if my machine can run more than that we'll create more clones and see where braks so what we'll do first we'll fire up our task manager keep that running in the background and we'll power up each virtual machine one by one and see the impact on our system resources so we're powering up the first XP clone we powered up our first XP clone and as we can see we've
assigned this XP clone 1 gig a ram and one CPU let's see what the impact is on our workstation physical resource now we're using 4.56 G ram versus the 3.33 that we started out with and CPU is pretty much holding steady let's fire up the second machine so the second machine has been booted up and now we see we're using 5.5 5 GB of RAM and again CPU utilization is staying in between 9 and basically 12% we'll fire up the third machine okay we now have
three virtual machines running each with a gig of RAM and one CPU and as you can see CPU utilization is staying pretty steady but RAM usage is pretty much incrementing in the 1 gab in a little bit less than 1 gbyte increments we'll go ahead and power up our fourth virtual machine so our fourth virtual machine has been powered up and again Ram is at 7.3 gig used and our CPU again staying steady I think we can see the linear the linear nature of our resource
utilization and see that Ram is most definitely going to be our bottleneck if you had a system with only 8 gig of RAM I would say that this would be the breaking point of four virtual machines let's uh continue to push the envelope so we have our fifth virtual machine running and we're at 8.5 gig used and 133% CPU utilization let's keep going so we now have have 10 virtual machines running all with 1 G of RAM and one CPU again CPU utilization is a fraction
of our overall system capability what we're seeing consistently that the issue isn't how much CPU that you have if you have a modern day uh Intel VT CPU or amdv CPU uh you can run quite a few VMS but the limitation becomes comes dis IO and memory I have uh in my laps practically even though we have 10 VMS running uh I usually see the bottom necks in my system actually using the VMS if there's any disc intensive activities happening on any of these virtual machines
then my system even with the overhead of having another uh 2 and 1/2 gig of RAM available to the system or rather 3 and 1/2 gig of RAM available to the system I still see per performance degradation because my hard drive is basically thrashing like crazy and I need a faster hard drive my next upgrade to this system will be a SSD drive which I think I should be able to get a fairly decent amount more of uh capacity out of running virtual machines in addition
I'll be able to uh practically use these virtual machines for for these and other tips you can visit virtualize geek.com and uh visit my YouTube channel thanks for lot
