Allocating More Than 4Gb RAM to P7 VM?

Working fine with 16GB allocated in P8

Just wanted to provide one more data point to this thread. I've got an iMac with 32GB of memory, and am running Ubuntu 12.10 under P8 with 16GB allocated to the VM. I was concerned by the warning to not exceed 4GB, but after running for a while with 16GB, 8GB, 4GB, and 2GB selected I could not tell any difference with either the host or virtual machine. I'm playing around with huge data sets (several GB in memory at a time) and it's nice to be able to use the memory I paid for.

I timed a few small, computationally intensive programs (calculating primes, etc) and there was no difference in execution time going from 2GB up to 16GB.

I'm not declaring victory, but so far it seems like a 16GB virtual machine on a 32GB host is working just fine.
 
Beware of the Second Prompt to confirm memory settings

This thread is a bit old but I just recently ran into this issue myself and wanted to provide an update on how I handled it. I'm running a 16gb Macbook Pro w/ Retina.

I believe the people saying that the 8gb setting wouldn't stick were running in to the same usability issue that I was. To set a VM to 8gb:

1. Shutdown the VM completely (don't just suspend it).
2. Go to Virtual Machine->Configure.
3. Set the memory to 8gb. This will prompt you with the warning. Select "Change".
4. Click the option to lock the settings
5. Start the VM
6. You will be prompted again with the warning. This is where I think people got messed up (because I did). The wording of the warning is very tricky, and ends up being backwards from the first warning. It says something like "Would you like to change BACK to 4gb". I know that I kept selecting "Change" instinctively, assuming I was telling it to use 8gb.

You want to select Don't Change on this prompt, indicating that you would like to keep the setting at 8gb.

From there everything has worked fine for me.
 
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