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Anyone good with virtual machines?

ajdroidx

ajdroidx

Android Expert
I decided to give a VM a try on the desktop before I buy parallels so I downloaded virtual box for my PC and trying to run Mint Linux on it. I know its suppose to be slower but its faster running from a live CD! I suspect I may have done something wrong.

I left everything at default, put the disc in the drive with the Linux ISO, chose the drive and pressed go. I could not even get firefox to load after about 5 minutes it took to dump me to the Mint desktop. So, I decided to just pull the plug on the experiment. So I told it to shut down and about 2 and a half minutes later, it finally ejects the DVD.

Obviously, reading from the optical drive is slowing things down as is the VM (running a 64bit OS in a 32bit native system (windows 7) could also be a problem as is the VM slows things down a bit too. But seriously? The live CD is much faster then this.

Should I point to the ISO that I downloaded (If it lets me?) Do I need to actually install linux to a hard drive and point to that?

EDIT:
It let me use the ISO on my HDD. So I am trying that...
 
ajdroidx said:
I decided to give a VM a try on the desktop before I buy parallels so I downloaded virtual box for my PC and trying to run Mint Linux on it...

I could not even get firefox to load after about 5 minutes it took to dump me to the Mint desktop...

Obviously, reading from the optical drive is slowing things down as is the VM (running a 64bit OS in a 32bit native system (windows 7) could also be a problem as is the VM slows things down a bit too.
Click to expand...
VirtualBox was originally developed to emulate in software an x86 PC machine on Sun Microsystems' SPARC CPU workstations running Solaris
 
I kind of scrapped that idea on the desktop for now. I guess my desktop is just getting old and running in 32bit is not helping either. Right now, however, I did install the trial version of parallels 8 on my MBP and now running the preview of windows 8 on the thing (I wanted to check it out before I broke the seal on the OEM Disc. Install was pretty painless. Not sure what to think of windows 8 yet.
 
Problem solved! Good!

Don't worry too much about running in 32-bit mode. There's hardly any software that has 64-bit versions, and even then the biggest gains you'll see is if you're doing stuff that requires a lot of RAM. If you never use more than 4GiB of RAM, you'll likely never notice a difference.
 
ALso, FWIW, I urge you to move on from VBox to VMware. On my Win 7 Machine, on boot, it made connecting to the Internet a 30-45 second process, during which many of my logon processes would wait. It made my whole boot process much. much slower than it needed to be. I triple verified that this was caused by VBox and VBox only.

I then moved on to VMware and my boot process shaved nearly a minute off.

But, trying to run a 64bit OS as a guest to a 32bit OS as host is, as SD said, unbearably slow.
 
I was going to also suggest VMware, but johnlgalt beat me to it ;)

I get VMware through school, and it works great. Easy to spin up a new VM and a lot of companies put out pre-built VMs in VMWare format (though some do the open VM format...)

Glad you got your problem solved. :)
 
VMs eat RAM. if you're going to be running several at once (i.e. a virtual network) plan on having at least 8Gb RAM. That should let you run 5 or 6 VMs together OK.
And make sure your CPU supports Hardware Virtualization. Most new ones do (Intel CORE i series, AMD Phenom ii/Athlon ii and newer definitely do.
 
Vbox is great if you are commercial and don't want to pay a licence fee. For home use, I always use VMware player. If a VM was an absolute MUST, at work, I would get the company to pay for VMware Workstation. Obviously on Mac, you would have to get VMware fusion.
 
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