Making a lab on my Macbook

FredZ89

Hello !

This weekend, I will be creating a lab environment on my macbook (I have no idea of the performances I'll get out of it to be honest, this is a 2010 Macbook Unibody with 4 Go of RAM). If you have a similar setup, feel free to share what it's like with me!

I found some quite good tutorials for setting up like 3 VMs with VirtualBox, a Windows Server one, Windows 7 one and a pfSense one to act like a "firewall" between the VMs and the Host.

I'm not really familiar with the whole virtualization thing, so if you have any tips or suggestions, go ahead!

Monkey Ball Warrior

The key issue, especially if running multiple simultaneous VM's, is resource allocation. You need to set the VM's to use enough memory to do what you need, without so much that your Host OS runs out of RAM. You should also set the Cores per VM so that they do not add up to more cores than you actually have. You will probably want to use Bonded Networking instead of the default NAT, so that each VM is on your LAN. You're going to want to install the Virtualbox Guest Additions inside the VMs so that you can run at fullscreen or share clipboards between the Host OS and the VMs (this will involve installing kernel headers in Linux, but IIRC it is pretty easy for windows). That's all I can think of right now.

RBach

You might want to consider upgrading your RAM to 8GB, but I'd see if performance is acceptable as-is. I'd give the Windows Server and 7 VMs 1GB each for starters and increase as needed.