Installation guide

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8. The Memory and CPU Allocation window displays. Choose appropriate values for the
virtualized CPUs and RAM allocation. These values affect the host's and guest's
performance.
Guests require sufficient physical memory (RAM) to run efficiently and effectively. Choose a
memory value which suits your guest operating system and application requirements. Most
operating system require at least 512MB of RAM to work responsively. Remember, guests use
physical RAM. Running too many guests or leaving insufficient memory for the host system
results in significant usage of virtual memory and swapping. Virtual memory is significantly
slower causing degraded system performance and responsiveness. Ensure to allocate
sufficient memory for all guests and the host to operate effectively.
Assign sufficient virtual CPUs for the guest. If the guest runs a multithreaded application,
assign the number of virtualized CPUs the guest will require to run efficiently. Do not assign
more virtual CPUs than there are physical processors (or hyper-threads) available on the
host system. It is possible to over allocate virtual processors, however, over allocating has a
significant, negative effect on guest and host performance due to processor context switching
overheads.
Red Hat En t erp rise Lin ux 5 Virt ualizat ion Guid e
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