How much RAM should I have to smoothly run a virtual machine?

Alright thanks for the information. I've got one last question:

Is there a free operating system like e.g. linux for "virtualbox" available?. It's not in my plans to buy a new system...

Linux is the best free option you have. And use VMware Player, not virtual box.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...tup-zorin.html

Cbarnhorst said:

The biggest boost to VM and host performance is an SSD. The performance gain is often dramatic to say the least. 8GB of ram and an SSD is currently my sweetspot.

Hi there

you can run a Windows VM in 2GB or even 1GB of RAM - provided your HOST system isn't too busy. SLOW I/O as I and others have said is far more likely to be a bottleneck than the CPU or even the RAM allocated for the VM.

With only 4GB RAM in the Host though you should consider running a 32 bit VM --this also doesn't need things like VT enabled if you have an older CPU.
An SSD IMO is the only way to store a VM these days. If you must use a HDD - then you are better off using a decent USB3 external drive - especially if your HOST OS isn't installed on an SSD.

If you can't do any of this then consider RAID 0 - while this won't give you any extra data protection against HDD failure it will speed up the I/O on your HDD's.

If your Host is Win 8 / 8.1 / W10 you can run "Software RAID" - essentially using "storage spaces" and striping the volumes -- this will act like RAID 0 and the volumes can be different sizes too.

Storage Spaces Overview

Cheers
jimbo

sorry to bring up a old thread i have windows 10 pro and hyper v wanting to run linux ubuntu in hyper-v i have 8gb of ram how much disk space and ram should i give the ubuntu should i leave the hyper-v at defaults out of the box? i have 756gb free out of 1 tb drive so i have lots disk space.

My Linux Mint machine runs fine with 1GB but I gave it 4GB. You should have plenty especially if you leave 4GB for Windows itself.

Virtualized memory is not handled the same way as host system memory so be conservative. Don't exceed the recommended memory allocation in order to keep cpu overhead down. The host cpu plays a more important role in memory management for the guest than it does for native ram (which is handled by the memory manager in hardware). The greater the allocation the greater the overhead on the cpu. 1 GB should be fine for most Linux distributions. Since you can adjust with experience, start conservatively.

ok i try it on defaults and see what it does thank guys and girls :)

I went with free virtualbox for some reason hyper-v kept crashing on a video drive so i uninstalled hyper-v with remove windows features and went with virtualbox seems to run better and no crashes sorry for the late reply all.