[CentOS] virtualization on the desktop a myth, or a reality?

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...

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/