Windows 10: How much RAM should I have to smoothly run a virtual machine?

Hi there

you can run a Windows VM in 2GB or even 1GB of RAM - provided your HOST system isn't too busy. SLOW I/O as I and others have said is far more likely to be a bottleneck than the CPU or even the RAM allocated for the VM.

With only 4GB RAM in the Host though you should consider running a 32 bit VM --this also doesn't need things like VT enabled if you have an older CPU.
An SSD IMO is the only way to store a VM these days. If you must use a HDD - then you are better off using a decent USB3 external drive - especially if your HOST OS isn't installed on an SSD.

If you can't do any of this then consider RAID 0 - while this won't give you any extra data protection against HDD failure it will speed up the I/O on your HDD's.

If your Host is Win 8 / 8.1 / W10 you can run "Software RAID" - essentially using "storage spaces" and striping the volumes -- this will act like RAID 0 and the volumes can be different sizes too.

Storage Spaces Overview

Cheers
jimbo

 

There are quite a lot.
Search for "virtualbox appliances": pre-installed VMs ready to deploy.

Example:
VirtualBox Virtual Appliances | VirtualBoxImages.com

 

sorry to bring up a old thread i have windows 10 pro and hyper v wanting to run linux ubuntu in hyper-v i have 8gb of ram how much disk space and ram should i give the ubuntu should i leave the hyper-v at defaults out of the box? i have 756gb free out of 1 tb drive so i have lots disk space.

 

My Linux Mint machine runs fine with 1GB but I gave it 4GB. You should have plenty especially if you leave 4GB for Windows itself.

 

Virtualized memory is not handled the same way as host system memory so be conservative. Don't exceed the recommended memory allocation in order to keep cpu overhead down. The host cpu plays a more important role in memory management for the guest than it does for native ram (which is handled by the memory manager in hardware). The greater the allocation the greater the overhead on the cpu. 1 GB should be fine for most Linux distributions. Since you can adjust with experience, start conservatively.

 

ok i try it on defaults and see what it does thank guys and girls *Smile

 

I went with free virtualbox for some reason hyper-v kept crashing on a video drive so i uninstalled hyper-v with remove windows features and went with virtualbox seems to run better and no crashes sorry for the late reply all.

 

Hi there

not quite true -- you DO need enough left over for the HOST to run the VM software properly without paging / swapping.

Also the better VM software uses Dynamic RAM so the VM whatever you allocate it will only be the maximum you specify in the config file. When the VM is idle that RAM is available again for the HOST.

Older versions of VM software fixed the allocation from your config file so the Host memory was always memory available MINUS the amount you'd allocated for the VM even when the VM was idle.

CPU isn't usually a problem on VM's -- RAM and decent I/O play a much bigger role --- this is of course assuming typical tasks a VM does like file serving, media streaming, office type apps such as email, skype etc.

CPU will count if your VM needs to do things like video editing, game playing, intensive photoshop etc.

Even here if you have a decent graphics card the CPU requirement can be minimized provided the VM can use the hardware graphics card rather than the "default" built in ones when using say VBOX or VMWARE.

I've generally found I can get pretty decent performance out of a fairly well loaded W10 X-64 PRO system VM allocating it 2 GB RAM on a 16 GB RAM server running CENTOS 7 as HOST.

I allocated 60GB HDD space for the W10 VM and stored it on an SSD -- works perfectly and use it almost daily --has Office 2016, Photoshop, SAPGUI, and quite a bit of other stuff.

On the same machine I have an XP VM running my hardware record Vinyl cutting machine + the studio software for creating the tracks on the Vinyl discs -- this also works fantastically well with 1 GB RAM allocated to it. (I need the XP machine as the hardware won't run on anything newer --it still does the job perfectly - and I don't want to spend a few thousand EUR / USD on new hardware when I don't need to --also no security here with the XP VM as it's isolated from the Internet.

Cheers
jimbo