Hello Everyone,
Thank you for the replies to my questions regarding system virtual
machine software. I have organized the replies into subheadings and
summarized the comments below. The original question was:
I would like to install a system virtual machine to run Ubuntu
Linux as a guest OS on a 32-bit Vista laptop. The idea is to allow
occasional use of crystallographic refinement programs while I'm away
from lab. The laptop has an Intel Core 2 duo processor (2.0 GHz) and 3
GB RAM.
There are popular software programs available (VMWare, Parallels,
VirtualBox, etc.), but is anyone aware of any considerations that would
make one better for the above purposes? For example, will one offer
easy control over distributing hardware resources to prevent crippling
Vista while running refinement within the guest Linux?
The organized/summarized responses:
Individual user experiences:
- VirtualBox 2.2.2 to run Ubuntu 9.04 (guest) on WinXP 32-bit (native).
Runs well with 512 Mbyte assigned memory with 64 Mbyte assigned
graphics memory (dual core 2.4 GHz machine with 2 Gbyte total RAM).
- VMWare used for various guest OSs. Found to work well.
- Parallels useful for Linux as a guest; VMWare for Windows as a guest.
- Qemu/Kvm and VirtualBox work well with Linux as a guest OS. Kvm
found to be troublesome for Windows as a guest OS.
- VMWare server 2 running CentOS (guest) on Linux (native)
Software considerations:
- VirtualBox is free
- VirtualBox supports hardware virtualization, but it is off by
default. Some others do as well.
- Some distributions of VMWare are free
- VMWare reported to be stable, has wide user-base, good documentation
and can run dual-CPU
General considerations:
- No accelerated graphics performance (i.e. Coot/Pymol run slowly at
~15 frames/sec. with non-native graphics.
- Previous threads recommend running graphics in native OS to take full
advantage of hardware acceleration
- Recommended to set up shared folders to transfer files between OSs to
facilitate using native graphics software/hardware.
- You have to reboot the machine to change the memory configuration,
but people agreed the software is generally easy to configure for
resource allocation.
Thanks again to all who replied,
-Andy Torelli
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Andrew T. Torelli Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Cornell University
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