Re: [Hampshire] New box for Virtualisation

Hi,

I'm no guru but I can share what I've learned during my first steps with VirtualBox.

A 32-bit OS can address about 3.5 GB of RAM. IIUC VBox seems to permanently allocate RAM to the images. This means you need to have enough physical RAM to cover the sum of all the VMs' memory plus the requirements of the host OS.

From this I would say you could just about get away with installing 4GB (3.5GB available), installing 32 bit Ubuntu then allocating 1GB of RAM to each of your VMs as long as you aren't doing anything really heavy, particularly not on the host as it will only have 512MB.

If you need anything more than this the host OS will need to be 64 bit as it needs to be able to access all the RAM in use and I would think you'd need at least 8GB of physical RAM. I've not tried it but I would hope you could run 32 bit OSes as guests on a 64 bit host. Can someone please confirm or refute this?

All the best,
Paul.
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