2 cores or 4 for Virtualbox?

[Sirolway]

Hi all

I’m running VirtualBox on a 2009 13” MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.
The guest OS is Windows 2003 Server, with SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and Cognos BI tools (fairly heavy java servlet).

It runs pretty well on my current machine but it’s time to get a new laptop soon & I’m torn between lightweight with retina display (I’m hoping for retina 11”/12”/13” MacBook Air) or quad core 15” MacBook Pro.

I’d rather have lightweight if I can get away with it, but I don’t want to regret not having the power later.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance

 

[n0cus]

Hi all

I’m running VirtualBox on a 2009 13” MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.
The guest OS is Windows 2003 Server, with SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and Cognos BI tools (fairly heavy java servlet).

It runs pretty well on my current machine but it’s time to get a new laptop soon & I’m torn between lightweight with retina display (I’m hoping for retina 11”/12”/13” MacBook Air) or quad core 15” MacBook Pro.

I’d rather have lightweight if I can get away with it, but I don’t want to regret not having the power later.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance

Windows 2003 Server is not a resource intensive operating system. You could absolutely get away with a dual core processor, dedicating a single core to Windows. Remember, you have hyper-threading as well, so you have two virtual cores for each physical core. You might want to use the money you saved on VMware Fusion or Parallels. VirtualBox is great, but investing in better virtualization software can really improve your performance.

 

[J232022]

You should be just fine , but one thing to consider is that Windows server 2003 is pretty old at this point and support for it will probably be dropped soon if it has not already . It will stop getting security patches and fixes . I think you would be better off running something more modern like Windows 8.1 or 7 . If you can wait I would recommend Windows 10 over Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 . Virtualbox is a great program too and its free if you need more advanced features I recommend Parallels .

 

[maflynn]

I'd opt for the quad core, just because you get more bang for your buck. You may find that as you upgrade, you'll need more horse power. The MBP will be able to deliver that horsepower for you.

Win2k3 is getting old as is 11g, you're going to need to upgrade those or lose out on support on updates.