Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Best way to go to allow for several concurrent virtual machines

BobbyCarbn

BobbyCarbn

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 21, 2009
155
0
I am interested to see if any MR users out there use their Mac Pro for running multiple virtual machines concurrently? Plenty of folks run one or two even on a MBP with little problems at all. I am considering running 4 at the same time. Is this going to work? I plan on running Vmware Fusion 3 with 4 virtual machines with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise. This will hopefully work as my all-in-one virtual lab for my security research and development.

I was thinking of an 8 core 2.66 (2009) MP with 24GB of RAM to start with.

Thoughts, suggestions?

Cheers!
BC
 
I run 4 all the time. 3 centos 1 winblows. Works fine. Same configuration you mention but with 32gb ram and 4 fast drives in raid0.
 
I recently tried this with my new 6 core MP with 12gb ram. (VMware Fusion 3)

One VM assigned 2 cores + 2gb ram, and another assigned 4 cores + 4gb ram. I ran Oracle 11g DB on one VM, and Oracle BI 11g on the other. I was shocked at how smoothly everything was running on my mac - I also had Safari with about 10 tabs open, iTunes open, iChat, and Mail. The CPU usage charts barely showed any high core usage (see attachment). Quite impressive.
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2010-09-18 at 5.54.22 PM.png
    Screen shot 2010-09-18 at 5.54.22 PM.png
    35.5 KB · Views: 82
You'll be fine as long as you have enough RAM. I routinely run 2 VMs concurrently with Fusion and everything runs smoothly.

Make sure that you have enough RAM to cover OS X plus the total of all the RAM allocated to your VMs (plus some additional RAM for upside). As long as your RAM covers what you have allocated to the VMs you'll be fine.
 
I run about 3-4 at a time. As others have said, RAM is going to be important. I'd get at least 16 gigs (depending on the guest OS's, Windows can be a RAM hog.)
 
Thanks for the replies! Great feedback. 24GB is now on my list for sure!
 
Now to decide, do I grab the oct-2.6 in the refurb store right now or hold out for an oct-2.93? :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back