On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
I am busy setting up some XEN servers on a SAN for high availability and Cloud Computing, and thought it could be cool to setup virtualization on a CentOS 5.5 Desktop, running on a Core i3 + 4GB RAM [...]
So, I installed CentOS + KDE, chose the Virtualization package and used Virtual Machine Manager to setup another CentOS VM inside CentOS (I only have a CentOS ISO on this SAN, since we don't use Debian / Slackware / FC / Ubuntu / etc). The installation was probably about the same speed as it would be on raw hardware. But, using the interface is painfully slow. I opened up Firefox and browsed the web a bit. The mouse cursor lagged a bit and whenever I loaded a slow / large website, it seemed asif the whole VM lagged behind.
The Virtual Machine didn't use much resources. I allocated 1CPU core & 512MB RAM to it
I've never allocated less than 1 GB RAM to a VM with an active GUI, but I suspect that RAM crunch is part of the problem.
Install CentOS 5 on raw hardware with 512 MB RAM and try running Firefox...