Virtual Machines with more than 8 GB RAM

[mikepre]

Hi, I come from the Windows world, and to be honest, I'm quite comfortable running my MacBook Pro and Max OS X Lion.

As I use heavily Virtual Machines with large databases, I decided to upgrade mi MBP to run 16 GB RAM and a decent 600 GB Intel SSD disk.

Problem is that running VMWare Workstation 7 on Windows, I was able to create VM´s with more thn 8 GB RAM... The logical change was to run VMWare Fusion for Mac, and I sadly realized that the limit was 8 GB per machine...

I downloaded Parallels Desktop for Mac (v 7, Build 7.0.15104) just to realize it has the same limitation...

Any reason for that? I need to run a VM with 12 GB RAM and I can not...

Regards

Michael

 

[Teddy J]

Did you ever get an answer to this?

Did you ever get an answer to this? I'm in the same situation although I'm more wondering about the RAM cap recommendation of only 4GB! Baffling coming over from VMware Workstation whereby you can allot what you need to allot.

See http://apple.stackexchange.com/ques...es-parallels-8-recommend-max-4gb-ram-for-a-vm

 

[mikepre]

Hi Teddy. I never got an answer... but I solved the problem installing Oracle VirtualBox for Mac...
Depending on the answer, I would buy or not Parallels...Guess what.... I didn't buy it...

I live perfectly well with VMware Fusion and Oracle VirtualBox (which is actually free).
VirtualBox can create VM's with more than 8 GB RAM...

regads

Michael

 

[mikepre]

In fact, big RAM VM's could be a problem with slow disks and low memory machines...
In my case, I have 16 GB RAM and a fast Intel SSD...
A 12 GB RAM VM running Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition works very fast...

 

[Teddy J]

Yes, same boat here with 16GB RAM and fast SSD. If that's the only reason, it would be helpful to hear that as a reason for the recommendation: handholding.