The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    thinkpad x301 and Virtual Machines ?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by chris33, Dec 17, 2008.

  1. chris33

    chris33 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    46
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Hi,

    How does the Lenovo thinkpad x301 performs compared with the Dell latitude e6400 for running Virtual Machines?

    On my old Dell Latitude D600, I can run a Virtual Machine using VMware, but when I run 2 Virtual Machines, the PC is becoming very very slow.

    I would like to be able to run several (2 or even 3) Virtual Machine on the x301. Has someone already done that ?

    Chris
     
    chris33, Dec 17, 2008
    #1
  2. malai5

    malai5 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    21
    Messages:
    13
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    I run 2 or 3 Virtual Machines with VirtualBox on my T61 with 4GB of RAM and have no problem with it slowing up.
    I think the problem arises if there is not enough memory for ALL the operating systems including the host.
    How much RAM do you have and how much do you assign to the Virtual Machines. The answer to those questions will be the solution to your problem.

    Cheers

    Malai5
     
    malai5, Dec 17, 2008
    #2
  3. BinkNR

    BinkNR Knock off all that evil

    Reputations:
    308
    Messages:
    1,000
    Likes Received:
    8
    Trophy Points:
    56
    I concur with this. Lack of sufficient memory is probably the biggest bottleneck for VMs—then sufficient disk IOPS and then sufficient CPU.
     
    BinkNR, Dec 17, 2008
    #3
  4. jjcore

    jjcore Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    28
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    You have to keep in mind that the X301 is by no means a power house. If you're doing very light work on these virtual machines then you should be fine, as long as you have 4 gigs of RAM. Just don't try to boot them all up at the same time.
     
    jjcore, Dec 17, 2008
    #4
  5. chris33

    chris33 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    46
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    On my Dell Latitude D600, I have 3GB RAM, and I usually assign 512MB RAM to the VM. With 2 VM running together, the system becomes very very slow.

    My plan would be to be able to run 2 or 3 VM simultaneously on the x301.
     
    chris33, Dec 17, 2008
    #5
  6. BinkNR

    BinkNR Knock off all that evil

    Reputations:
    308
    Messages:
    1,000
    Likes Received:
    8
    Trophy Points:
    56
    You really can’t expect too much from a notebook running VMs. VMs tend to make a lot of IO requests to the HD and the standard single 5400rpm drive found in most notebooks are not really ideal for this. VMs perform best when their virtual drives are stripped across multiple drives, such as RAID10, RAID5 or even RAID1.
     
    BinkNR, Dec 17, 2008
    #6