Is a mobile Core i5 ok for running two virtual machines?

[StinkyPinky]

My current laptop is from 2008 and only has 2gig of ram so cannot cut it. I need to run two VM's for security testing on a laptop. Likely Ubuntu as one VM and Windows XP (or possibly Win 7) as the other VM.

Obviously a quad core CPU would be ideal but they have a price premium so would a higher end Core i5 do the job?

I'd only be running these VM's for a year and after that it will just be used for basic tasks so that's another reason to try and cut back. But I only want to do that if it is feasible.

 

[Sheep221]

running linux and windows XP would be doable, but not windows 7 I guess, but more ram is definitely needed, the systems will boot at 1 gig setting or less, but they would be sluggish for many programs within the WMs

 

[wilds]

It will be perfectly fine for running two VM's simultaneously as long as you have more than 4 gigs of RAM. I would upgrade to 8 gigs.

 

[podspi]

What will the utilization of the VMs be? If they're low utilization, upgrading the RAM + an SSD should be ok. I ran VMs on my C2D mobile @ 1.5ghz...

 

[Doh!]

I used to run two VMs on an i5-2435M (don't know if it's considered high-end by any means). I would recommend a minimum of 8GB RAM. Also a SSD helps a lot.

 

[wilds]

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but SSD's are truly life changing. The time I've saved is remarkable. When using a computer running a traditional HDD, I often forget how much I waited for things. Now the slowest part of my computer is myself.

i5's are perfectly fine for VM's.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Given the hardware acceleration likely provided by your machine,you can easily run however many virtual machines that will fit in RAM. And bump up the RAM to at least 4 GB if not 8 GB.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Cool, thanks guys. i5 it is.