Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Virtualization on your laptop
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Virtualization on your laptop

vampireJvampireJ Member
edited September 2011 in Tutorials

Hi guys!

Recently my work laptop is "acting" up. And I am planning to buy a new one. I have decided on a particular laptop model (acer 4552g cheap one at only about $700) with a phenom n930 quad core- cpu has amd-v support.

After careful thought- I have decided to use virtualization on my laptop. As I am a programmer, I have thought about the benefits of using virtualization in my work. so anyway-

my questions are-

  1. Anybody with this kind of setup?
  2. What virtualization do you use- as I would be using graphical guests (and graphical host as well)- I think virtualbox would have to be the easiest. I am thinking my host is debian (which I would not be upgrading at all after a while) and my primary guest is ubuntu- which would be primarily my work environment as well.
  3. How do you find working in a guest os? Is it easy- any lags, comfortable etc

Thanks a lot!

«13

Comments

  • yomeroyomero Member
    edited September 2011

    For me, VMware has been the best solution, of course isn't free.

    Virtualization is comfortable if you will not do heavy graphical (3d) tasks. And probably will be better if your host is windows because some problems with drivers and so (I had problems with Virtualbox and Linux hosts).

    And about Having AMD-v or Intel-vt... I have been virtualizing since Athlon XP processors without problems, and for me doesn't show any significant gain.

  • Normally I use VMWare Server / VirtualBox.

    My experience with them is that it works very well even on my Core Duo Laptop. No lag in Graphical environment.

    AMD-V/Intel-Vt is meant for hardware assisted virtualization. They are essential if you want to run 64 bit Guest on 64 bit Host.

  • I rarely need to use Virtualization on my home computers, but I use VirtualBox..

    Does what I need it todo

  • Hi thanks for all the replies!
    The laptop would have 8gb so the host would be 64 bit (debian). Primary guest would be ubuntu 32 bit. I rarely use windows but I might have an xp guest so I can check my web projects once in a while or perhaps play some recent good games- warcraft / dota perhaps.

  • vampireJ said: Hi thanks for all the replies! The laptop would have 8gb so the host would be 64 bit (debian). Primary guest would be ubuntu 32 bit. I rarely use windows but I might have an xp guest so I can check my web projects once in a while or perhaps play some recent good games- warcraft / dota perhaps

    Blizzard games apparently have a good record of working in Wine.

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    yomero said: For me, VMware has been the best solution, of course isn't free.

    VMware Player is free and can make VM's now :) I personally use VMware Workstation. Not to turn this into a hacking thread or anything but if you register a trial then change your computers date then the trial will work past the 30 days. I don't do that though because it's annoying.

  • drmikedrmike Member
    edited September 2011

    Blizzard games apparently have a good record of working in Wine.

    Don't tell me that. Itching for something to play on this thing and WoW just went free for the first 20 levels or so. I have enough time wasters. :)

  • drmike said: Don't tell me that. Itching for something to play on this thing and WoW just went free for the first 20 levels or so. I have enough time wasters. :)

    WoW is my favorite game.

  • Team Fortress runs fine on Linux as well ;) . Anyways, VMWare (Workstation) is the virtualization I use.

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    Boltersdriveer said: Anyways, VMWare (Workstation) is the virtualization I use.

    How much does it cost? My uncle gave me a license code that works nicely (: YEAH :)

  • WoW is my favorite game.

    (humour)Well heck with that then.(/humour)

    Actually was playing the free version of Everquest2 for awhile before the old laptop went down. Interesting but had to play it with a help site open in the browser. Really didn't give many hints where to find objectives.

  • Virtualbox is amazing!

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I've tried VirtualBox but ended up going back to VMWare Player. I just found it performed better with Intel Atoms. :D

  • I use VirtualBox and find it fine for general playing around with other OS systems.

  • KuJoe said: I've tried VirtualBox but ended up going back to VMWare Player. I just found it performed better with Intel Atoms. :D

    And at Sept 14, Vmware Workstation release it's version 8!

  • I'm an every day user of virtualbox... Mostly because of the snapshot feature, which let me try and re-try :-)

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    Who actually purchased VMware Workstation, I bet most people just get a crack or something :\

  • XeoncrossXeoncross Member
    edited September 2011

    I'm doing an install of Windows 8 in Virtualbox OSE 4 on a 2GB Dual-Core Ubuntu system - so we'll see how that goes. I can't imagine running a VM on an Atom processor - they just barely handle a single OS.

  • I use VirtualBox on Windows 7 on my laptop. Windows 7 as host because I want to be able to run some Windows software (like games) with full access to the native hardware, and also Windows is the only OS that fully supports my laptop's hardware (NVidia Optimus) at this time.

    I went with VirtualBox because it's just easier to get working on guest OSes. VMWare has some very nice features, and it also seems to be more well implemented than VirtualBox where they both have the same features, but if you aren't running one of its small handful of approved guest OSes it's a huge pain to get the guest services working. VirtualBox seems to benefit both from being open-source and having a fast release schedule here and have much better guest support, sometimes built into the guests themselves. VirtualBox also has several tricks (like using an absolute positioning pointing device to avoid having to "grab" the mouse) that make it work better when it's on an OS that just doesn't have any guest support at all, the Windows 8 developer image is quite usable with any guest tools for example.

    Do keep in mind that whatever host OS you go with, you will want to keep it updated. The security, stability, and performance of your guest OSes all rest at base on the security, stability, and performance of your host OS. If you're looking for minimal maintenance, there are several "hypervisor OSes" available for free, like VMWare's ESXi, and Microsoft's Hyper-V Server. I don't know if they do any of the things you'd want a host OS to do on a laptop, like power management or wifi control, but they're much more minimal, which is nice if running the virtual machines is all you want the host OS to do. I haven't tried it, but I think Hyper-V Server might have some solid graphics/3D acceleration support, if that's important to you, and it should also work fairly well with Linux guests; on one point release of the Linux kernel, more kernel changes were contributed by Microsoft engineers than any other company, all related to Hyper-V support.

    If you do need to be able to run any sort of software with direct hardware access, though, that will dictate your host OS to whatever that software runs on.

  • fanovpn said: on one point release of the Linux kernel, more kernel changes were contributed by Microsoft engineers than any other company, all related to Hyper-V support.

    Then it found out their contributions contained a lot of GPL code, which they released. Now Microsoft have abandoned the Hyper-V support they added..

    Just use VirtualBox/KVM/HVM etc,

  • @Infinity I paid for a license long a ago, if I'm correct I think it was version 5.0, today I just use VirtualBox or KVM if I have hardware support and Linux as the host OS.

    So far VirtualBox has worked well in working environment (small biz, windows xp as host, linux as guest).

    Thanked by 1Infinity
  • @Infinity: VMWare Workstation user since v1.0 and yes I did purchase the license and all upgrades (till the version I'm currently using, which is v5.5)

  • IF it is WIndows I use VMWare or Hyper-V. Just make sure you have alot of RAM.

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    You don't really need "alot" of RAM. VMware takes under 500Mb on my computer plus the virtual machines RAM.

  • @Infinity

    I bet most people just get a crack or something

    Funny, I was thinking the same thing. :whistle:

  • Infinity said: You don't really need "alot" of RAM. VMware takes under 500Mb on my computer plus the virtual machines RAM.

    I like to open alot of VM's at once so I need lots of RAM :)

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited September 2011

    Xeoncross said: I'm doing an install of Windows 8 in Virtualbox OSE 4 on a 2GB Dual-Core Ubuntu system - so we'll see how that goes. I can't imagine running a VM on an Atom processor - they just barely handle a single OS.

    So wrong. I regularly run 2 Linux VMs on top of my base OS (Windows 7) while watching streaming content at 720p without a hiccup. ;) I do love how under-rated Intel Atoms are, people think they are slow which keeps their prices down for me. :D

  • That's because they see "1.6Ghz" on them, and "3.6GHz" on other processors and automatically assume "Well obviously, the 1.6GHz is slow as hell", when in reality, it could be that differences in the microarchitectures make 1.6GHz on the Atom equivalent to 3.6GHz on some other architecture. GHz is only a relevant measure of speed when you're comparing apples to apples - processors within the same microarchitecture.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    Good point NickM, while I don't expect an Intel Atom to compete with a 3.6GHz CPU (maybe an older single-core CPU) I do feel that the Intel Atom it greatly under estimated in terms of price for processing power.

    It's funny because I use my Intel Atom 230 server as my production server at home and my dual AMD Opteron server as my development one. :)

Sign In or Register to comment.