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Can you run a virtual machine(s) on a MB Air?

StinkyPinky

StinkyPinky

Diamond Member
I know this sounds kinda crazy, but I need to run a couple of virtual machines for 6 months or so. After that I would only use the laptop for casual use so I really don't want to buy some beast for such a short time. Is that doable? The OS would probably be Win 8 and some version of Linux (Mint).

The CPU on the MBA can turbo boost up to 2.6GHz and I can up the ram to 8 gigs, so it seems possible?
 
Do you want to run them at the same time? You can certainly run Linux within 1GB of RAM and Windows 7 can be run reasonably within 2GB. Depends largely on what you intend to run within the VMs themselves.

It will run just fine but you will be quite constrained on RAM unless you go up to 8GB, but its doable at 4GB depending on if you need to run them both and what software you would run in each. You need to add up the RAM requirements of the applications you intend to use.
 
Yeah I'd get the 8 gigs. The Win 8 VM would be doing nothing. Just sitting there idle. The linux machine would be doing a bit (probing Windows for exploits...perfectly legit research I assure you). But even the linux VM wouldn't need a lot of grunt, but I'd like to give it 3 gigs of ram I think.

So 3 gigs for linux, 2 for win8, and 3 for the host....seems possible?
 
I used to run 2 VMs (usually XP and then either Vista or some flavor or Linux) on my OG MacBook, with a Core Duo, 512MB RAM, and a spinning hard drive. The MacBook Air is something like 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster than my old MacBook, you should be fine, just get the 8GB which you already are planning on.

A couple of questions all the same:
1: Does it have to be a laptop, would a Mac Mini perhaps work instead, if you're trying to save money that is.
2: What size Air were you looking at? If the 13", would it make more sense to just spend the $200 more to get the rMBP instead, and just not worry about performance at all? Or is battery life a major factor?

The 13" rMBP is a demonstrably better system in every category but 2 (battery life and weight), and is not all that much more money.
 
3 years of ITT/Networking classes (Windows XP & Linux VMs) on a Macbook, 2.13GHz C2D / 4GB RAM. Upgrading from a spinner to an SSD was a godsend. Otherwise, yes, it's been fine. The MBA would be as good as or better. Better, mostly.

Install "lightweight" desktop environments if you can. I've gotten graphics acceleration to work with the guest additions and so on, but it's not worth the hassle for most purposes and you use less RAM in the bargain. Most of my work now is in CLI-mode anyway.
 
I remember running VMware Workstation 1.0 on a Pentium desktop with 96 MB RAM. 😀

Tried firing up a Win 8.1 VM in VirtualBox 4.3 the other day and it kept blue screening at login. It worked fine for a co-worker on a Windows 7 host.

8 GB is perfectly fine for what you're intending.
 
Many of our CCIE's run VM's on their Airs. Many had MBP's previously with SSDs thinking the Air would be too underpowered.

It works great.

Most run Parallels or Fusion as well for windows/Mac OSX uberness at the same time.

I run a mid-2010 15" MBP with soon to be Maverick and Windows 7. My company doesn't provide Win 8 yet, but I may upgrade it myself as I am running 8 on everything else in my home now (4 machines)
 
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