[Robbin]

I am relatively new to VMs and have a few basic questions.

I created a penetration testing lab in Virtualbox but the performance on both PCs is now going down so much that I consider buying a better computer. What is to consider? Many CPUs to be able to share them with the VM? Just a high frequency (how fast should be enough?)?  For what kind of PC specifications do I need in order to have normal performances with VMs?

SSD should increase performance but is that also directly improving the VMs?

[Takehito Morokuzu]

What do you currently use? Please specify motherboard, cooler, and drive the VMs are installed on.
Also make sure you have enough RAM and they are in dual channel (you have at least 2 sticks of ram rather than 1)

[991z3r0]

SSD is going to improve your IOPS obviously. You'll want a good ammount of RAM as well as a decent CPU to handle any extra overhead.

I'm not sure how many VM's you're running and what specs you're assigning the VM's.

I have a few VM hosts running multiple VM's and also vMotion but most of that is far beyond what you'd want to run.

Something with SSD's, 32GB's or 64GB's (more is better) of RAM, 8 thread or 8 core CPU would be able to run a few VM's with decent load somewhat reliably.


A typical VDI type of VM for consumer use is usually 2 (commonly 4 also) vCPU's (Xenon processors) and 8GB's of RAM per VM guest. Keep in mind that's also on a full blown server like a Dell r720 or HP DL320 G8 (current is like gen10 i think) and the server's are also usually running a SAN storage environment for storage needs.

[conradxen]

Also depends what your running in your VM's. If you have a few Windows 10's running gonna be hard work, but if just a kali and an metasploitable running most low spec machines should be able to cope.