Ram/Processor settings for VM

[BayouTiger]

I think it's been awhile since I've seen this discussed. I've used VMware for many years both for Fusion on my Macs and ESXi for my servers, and a consistent thing that I have always seen is that a VM runs fine with a smaller footprint than what a equivalent PC would have, as an example I can do things just as efficiently with 2 CPUs and 4Gb of ram that run similar to how they would run on my Thinkpad with double both of those specs. I figure it's because I don't have all the extra crap like Adobe Licensing managers and MS outlook daemons and all the other crap that the host OS handles in the background.

Curious what others have seen as their sweet spots.

 

[kohlson]

I have it set to 4 cores, 4096 MB. I use some odd audio/video utilities from time to time.
Something that made a big difference for me was under Advanced Settings: Hard Disk Bufferingisabled.

 

[BayouTiger]

I have it set to 4 cores, 4096 MB. I use some odd audio/video utilities from time to time.
Something that made a big difference for me was under Advanced Settings: Hard Disk Bufferingisabled.

Never played with that setting before. I'll have to give it a try!

 

[mlody]

It really depends what you use the VMs for and if you have capacity to spare on the hosts. I would use OS and the application requirements as the baseline for sizing, but watch out for over provisioning as that can actually negatively impact the performance. If I am playing with Windows and trying to maximize the performance, I will use 2-4 vCPUs and 8 GB ram. Even stupid tasks like windows patching will consume 2 vCPUs easily, so sometimes it is good idea to give more resources during the initial setup and than resize it. There is really no golden formula.