Wednesday, March 18, 2009

How many VMs can my Asus EEE PC handle?? 2?? no.. 4?? em... hehe..




Intro:
I've been working on my NAD project with vbox's vms.. i'm really curous what this little single core cpu machine can do. Here is the config..

Asus EEE
- 2G Ram (MAX for eee)
- Fedora 10
- fresh boot
- laptop mode (as real ram as much as possible, instead of swap)
VMs
- 4 F10 with 256 ram, 4mb Video ram, text mode (init 3)
- 1 F10 with 512 ram, 12mb Video, X windows

Assumption:
- F10 host (Asus EEE) fresh boot with X running use about 500-700mb
- One F10 VM in text mode use around 250Mb
- idealy
- total 2gb ram means I can use at least 5 Vms.. (700+(250*5))
- when the VM in text mode and idle, it use 5-15% CPU
- start all VMs one by one to reduce run time and chance of crashes

Result:
- IT WORKS!!! 5VMs running smoothly!!
- impressive!!
- it use some swap but.. well.. cos the last one was 512mb F10..
- it may able to run 6 VMs smoothly if I have 2 more 256mb ram F10
- really impressive!!
- if it has service running (httpd, dns).. it may use a bit more memory... and a lot more CPU. using a 'find' command use 60% host CPU already!
- it may able to handle 6VMs or even 7VMs in text mode and still have an acceptable performance. even with some simple service on and those are not busy services..
- it's perfect for testing...
- it's absolutely impressive!!!! ;-p

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