Virtual Machine Stuff

[ShadyHost]

I am in need of a ton of virtual machines. I have installed one copy of Windows 8 on a 15gb virtual machine and now I am cloning it as many times as I possibly can.

 

What are some ways I can make 10 copies of Windows 8 run well on one machine?

Each machine has 15GB of disk space and 3GB of RAM

 

Specs are:

 

i7 4770k @ 4.5GHz

32GB 1600mhz RAM

128GB Vertex 4 SSD

2x 1TB in RAID 0

320GB drive for other stuff

GTX 780 SC

Windows 8 64-bit

 

It doesn't need to be butter smooth just as long as they run without freezing every 2 seconds.

I am using Oracle VM VirtualBox

[darkstar]

Generally speaking, your drive(s) will most likely be your bottleneck. That being said, it depends on the the workload and work type you intend to put these VMs through. You might also want to consider reducing the amount of memory you allocate to your VMs (Windows 8 virtual machines can run on a minimum of 1GB but I'd recommend going with 2GB) as if all 10 VMs need to use all of the 3GB of memory that you allocate, your host won't have much memory left for both the system and vm box.

[MikeD]

Also, do not forget to enable hardware virtualization features and to tweak all the other settings.

[MrPete1985]

Why are you running 10 machines at once?  The most I ran was 5 and that was for a school project, I had 2 servers and 3 clients.

 

Anyway the way I cloned my VMs was install windows then run sysprep and shut them down, then I copied and pasted the folder that the VM was stored in.

[ShadyHost]

Why are you running 10 machines at once?  The most I ran was 5 and that was for a school project, I had 2 servers and 3 clients.

 

Anyway the way I cloned my VMs was install windows then run sysprep and shut them down, then I copied and pasted the folder that the VM was stored in.

ah I bet that made the cloning process faster.

it takes about 20 minutes using the cloning tool.

[MikeD]

ah I bet that made the cloning process faster.

it takes about 20 minutes using the cloning tool.

It is faster if you use the linked clone I believe, since the machines will be tied to the original disk.

I think it uses some sort of copy-on-write mechanism where it only copies to its disk any changes that you make, but I am not sure if it's that or if changes to things that existed in the original will be kept there.

[ShadyHost]

It is faster if you use the linked clone I believe, since the machines will be tied to the original disk.

I think it uses some sort of copy-on-write mechanism where it only copies to its disk any changes that you make, but I am not sure if it's that or if changes to things that existed in the original will be kept there.

Well really I was going for 10 seperate machines that would work independently of each other.

I've got myself a project that I don't care to share

[MikeD]

Well really I was going for 10 seperate machines that would work independently of each other.

I've got myself a project that I don't care to share

Fair enough!

[IdeaStormer]

Don't forget to disable the Paging file on your VM's, the VM's using the paging file is what mainly kills your I/O unless you are actually writing a ton of stuff, then you might want to consider a CIFS (samaba or windows share) share folder to save files to avoid writing to the VM's disk.

 

Clone after you have fully configured the one you're basing your clone off of (of course). You can also un-install all the BS apps like games, fax, etc. that won't be used.