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VirtualBox: Making the Most of Any Operating System You Choose

Mar 7, 2012

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Retrieving the openSUSE Disk Image

In contrast to other virtualization tools I've used, VirtualBox allows me to mount a DVD or CD image file (often an .ISO file) directly. There is no need to burn the image to physical media and add the physical CD drive as a virtual drive. It just works.

Go to http://www.opensuse.org/en/ and review openSUSE and licensing terms. Navigate to the Download website area[md]in this case, accessed via the big Get It button. You next challenge is remembering if your computer supports a 32- or 64-bit OS. Virtual Box is powerful enough to offer support for both if your hardware supports a 64-bit OS. Click the Download button once you've decided which version to use. While you wait, consider downloading documentation from the same page.

What Factors Influence My 32-bit Versus 64-bit Decision?

How much RAM and what CPU do you have? If performance is important, your hardware must have adequate RAM and an adequate 64-bit processor. How much is enough? Unfortunately, I can't make recommendations. Much depends on the host OS and how well tuned it is. Modern OS versions seem to require 2GB of physical RAM just to run, leaving little room for virtualized computers. An efficient operating system, such as Mac OS X Lion, can do reasonably well with 4GB of RAM.
How many virtual computers will you run simultaneously? System load and resources consumed rise exponentially as you start more virtual computers. You may need to experiment with several versions and determine which is best on your host computer.
Which OS versions will you run on the virtual computer? Let's face it: Even modern Linux versions offer a lot of abilities. The disk space and memory needed has really grown. You may find you can run more efficiently (albeit less securely) with older versions of Linux.
What foreground and background tasks does the host computer run? Windows has dozens of services that take the pain away from using streaming media for example. All of these running services come at a cost in system resources. The more resources consumed by the hosting computer's OS, the fewer are left for virtual computers.
How much disk space does the host computer have, and how well defragmented is it? Some OS versions fragment the files across the hard drive like a sneeze onto facial tissues. This makes performance suffer when the computer must retrieve file bits from discontiguous parts of the hard drive. Of course, nice tools (such as the Auslogics disk defragmenter) keep performance moving well.

Modern disk drives seem to offer a lot of space and improved performance. Are you still using an old, old system to host modern OS systems? This might work (no guarantees). You may be able to create many virtual computers, running them only as needed, if you do not consume much more than 75 percent of your total disk space. Of course, there are many other factors to consider. Many disk defragmenters need at least 10-25 percent free space available to operate.

Overall, modern computing hardware, with a moderate number of virtualized computers running (one or two), might provide tolerable performance when running a virtualized 64-bit OS. If not, virtualization is all about experimentation and tuning. Download both images. Create multiple virtual computers, if you have space enough. Try them both. Max out your computer's installed RAM.

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