[dundee] Virtualisation, any wise words?

[James Young]

Hiya Chris,

You can't do anything about the processor but Another 1GB of RAM in the 
laptop isn't a bad way to start.  Use part of the external drive you're 
going to get to host the VMs.  That's actually the key - the disk i/o; 
I've found is the biggest problem.  The spindle speed in the laptops are 
usually either 5400  or worse still....4200rpm which for virtualisation 
is yuck.

Andrew just posted up.  Yep eSATA is good; ideally dumping a pcmcia 
firewire/ esata in there will significantly improve performance.  I'd 
use www.span.com as I've used these guys in the past and what they do 
know their disks.  If you must stick with USB2 go for a disk with the 
most cache you can.  A nice enclosure and a seagate 7200.11 with 32mb 
cache.  Actually, eSata is so good that even your FCAL drives can't look 
at maxing the bus out.   I'm thinking esata is about hybrid drives.

 Looking further ahead the next generation disks are probably going to 
either have big caches or just be completely solid state anyway.  Solid 
state is an option but it's a performance option at the moment with 
samsung doing 64GB.   So, we're all still a couple of buying cycles away 
from affordable solidstate.

So, on balance the seagate or a similar perpendicular drive with a £40 
enclosure with fw400&USB will do the job.



chris wyllie wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> Things here in Edinburgh were going fine until I was told that for our 
> RAD course this term we're using, wait for it, VB.NET!?! I mean 
> seriously, wtf? Anyway, that kinda means I have to create a working 
> windows system somehow on my carefully set up Linux machine 
> here(almost tears now lol).
>
> I'm aware I could reinstall everything and create a dual boot with 
> XP/Linux but I don't really want to mess about with things just now. I 
> also looked at setting up XP on an external drive but the hacks 
> involved scared the **** outta me.
>
> I know Gordon's done a fair bit of virtualisation and I'm sure more of 
> you have. Basically, is it a viable option to set up a virtual machine 
> running winXP to do my windows development on? Will it function and be 
> fast enough? (I'll attach my specs).
>
> If so, what VM software would you recommend(Qemu/Xen/VMware/other?) 
> and any links to tuts on setting it up would be appreciated. the ones 
> I've found so far seem to think that the install will be too slow to 
> work from properly, which would be a shame.
>
> I'm running Elive Gem(so Debian Etch) on:
> Centrino Duo @ 1.66GHz
> 1Gb RAM
> ~1Gb Swap
> 120Gb HDD
>
> Ooh, also if anyone could recommend a large(>=300Gb) USB2 external 
> drive that works well with *nux that would be fantastic.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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