Yes wrote:


Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were useful
for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in order to have
at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not sure I'll do that
because of how I'd want to configure the s/w side, but that's a
different issue :-)

I have a machine with 4GB of RAM installed.

Linux virtual machines get 1GB.
Windows machines get 512MB or 256MB. But that
can be adjusted before starting a guest OS, so it's
adjustable.

I run either two or three virtual machines on my 4GB
computer. Two large ones and a small one is about
all that fits. The small one functions as a bridge
between VM addons being available in one environment, and
not another.

VMs are limited in terms of their connectivity. So
somethings it hard to get things "in" and "out" of
the VM.

VMs allow evaluating operating systems, without
shutting down and rebooting. If I'm worried something
will infect the host OS, I can switch to a VM and
test it there.

The number of hard drives, might be a reflection
of the amount of sustained I/O to be expected.
Say one VM is writing 100GB of data, while I'm trying
to read USENET in Thunderbird on my host OS. If all the
I/O of the VM, was supported by my second hard drive,
there would be fewer hesitations while I'm reading
USENET articles on the host (using the first disk).
So rather than it being a "storage space issue",
sometimes it just the amount of hard drive activity,
and spreading it out so there is less head movement
on the hard drive.

Paul