Does anyone have an opinion on the efficacy of running virtual machines for typical home use? I kind of like the idea. I don't know whether it would be any more efficient than what I have now, though I can never leave anything alone. I'm mainly curious if there is any potential performance benefit in dividing tasks with major system loads over multiple VM's. What I mean by that is, instead of multitasking on one system, dividing up the tasks between individual VM's. I'm just not sure if there is any worthwhile performance benefit on a typical home system. I'm sure with a serious server setup it's much more beneficial. I was planning on having at least 2 VM's setup, one on XP and the other on Linux. The XP VM would be for games and other software compatibility requirements. I was planning on using the Linux VM for all the internet stuff. Other than that, I can't really think of any reason I'd need/want to run any other OS' other than that.
I'm posting from my newly installed VMWare Ubuntu virtual machine. This is pretty cool! Watching Modern Marvels on my XP main machine while browsing the net through the Linux VM, and it's running pretty well so far. I can see I need more ram though. lol
I don't think you will get any performance benefit. Generally, the resources in your computer are the resources you have to work with. The only possible benefit I could see would be limiting the resources for your Windows VM so that Windows does not continue to hog more and more of them. However, whatever you are doing on the Windows VM will be limited by the resources allocated to it.
The main reason for running VMs is to limit the number of physical machines needed. It is very reasonable to use VMs for home or personal use, especially if you have certain applications that run better on a different OS than your primary OS. Generally speaking, applications will run slower in a VM than in a native install of the OS.
I'm posting from my newly installed VMWare Ubuntu virtual machine. This is pretty cool! Watching Modern Marvels on my XP main machine while browsing the net through the Linux VM, and it's running pretty well so far. I can see I need more ram though. lol
Running pretty flawless?
You running it on a single screen?
Ubuntu uses considerably less resources I find.
It's not running bad so far. I'm still learning the OS as I have almost no experience with Linux. The only times I've ever used Linux was years ago, and it was different systems like Mandrake and Redhat I think. So far, I have my VM set for only 500mb of ram usage, and it doesn't run too bad. There's just a bit of lag.
I'm still on a single screen. What I want to eventually do is get 2-3 other monitors so I can run one VM per monitor and truly multi-task. I have absolutely no real reason I need to, I just think it would be cool to do.
Does anyone have an opinion on the efficacy of running virtual machines for typical home use? I kind of like the idea. I don't know whether it would be any more efficient than what I have now, though I can never leave anything alone. I'm mainly curious if there is any potential performance benefit in dividing tasks with major system loads over multiple VM's. What I mean by that is, instead of multitasking on one system, dividing up the tasks between individual VM's. I'm just not sure if there is any worthwhile performance benefit on a typical home system. I'm sure with a serious server setup it's much more beneficial. I was planning on having at least 2 VM's setup, one on XP and the other on Linux. The XP VM would be for games and other software compatibility requirements. I was planning on using the Linux VM for all the internet stuff. Other than that, I can't really think of any reason I'd need/want to run any other OS' other than that.