On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:13:56 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>>>> OTOH, last time I tried to set up a virtual machine, it took two
>>>>> days just to install Windows XP and update to service pack 3. That's
>>>>> quite absurdly slow...
>>>> You need better hardware.  It should never take that much time to
>>>> install an OS - in my VMs, it never took that long....
>>>>
>>>> What specs on the machine (including host OS)?
>>>  From memory, it was a 4 GHz Pentium IV with 512 MB RAM, running QEMU.
>>>
>>> (The laptops I'm looking at using are this spec or worse.)
>> 
>> Memory would be the issue here, no wonder it took forever to install,
>> it was probably swapping fiercely.
>> 
>> For good virtualization, you really need to have at least 1 or 2 GB of
>> memory.  Insufficient host memory can lead to serious performance
>> problems.
> 
> It didn't seem to be swapping *at all*. Hardly any HD activity. Just
> 100% CPU, constantly.

If for some reason the guest OS isn't relinquishing control to the host 
(which can happen), that also would explain it.  But if your host OS 
requires 256 MB to run and the guest requires 256 MB to run, there's no 
memory left for the actual virtualization software, so it has to get 
memory from somewhere.

512 MB is a fairly low spec for any system doing virtualization, 
regardless of the software.  My bet is still on memory.

> I've heard people claim that the problem is QEMU - which is a user-mode
> hardware emulator rather than a virtualisation program that runs most
> code natively... but having never seen any other VM product, I don't
> know if it makes much difference.

Grab VMware Server from http://www.vmware.com - it's free.  Not quite as 
easy to use as VMware Workstation, but WS is a pay-for product.

Jim

Post a reply to this message