What tasks aren't suiteable for Virtual Machines

[Immemorial]

I've been wondering about what tasks are unlikely to work properly when using a virtual machine in Linux Mint 18.3. Can someone tell me if there are any (types of) applications that seem particulary problematic or just flat out don't work as they should (or that need a incredible amount of RAM - i.e. much more than they should normally need - to actually work)?

Thanks in advance.

[Rocky Bennett]

Audio/video tasks might not work to well. Improper privileges and not enough resources are the main reasons why. You can set up the privileges easy enough, but the resources are physical.

[thx-1138]

And stuff that requires 'raw access' to the underlying hardware, eg. you can't modify and/or update (the actual) BIOS from inside a VM...

[trapperjohn]

Hi,

In production environments I have found that SQL servers underperform on VMs. Network Available Storage too.

I don't have any benchmarks... other than complaint frequency.

[Termy]

It depends on the setup, the VM software used, the VM settings, and the host hardware. In my experience, with a pretty decent rig, and a well set up VirtualBox, my Mint 18.2 and Mint 18.3 VMs work very well, with the one caveat (as with VBox), being that video performance is terrible. So if you want to do something which is graphically intensive, a VM isn't ordinarily your solution, although I've heard VMware is good, and that GPU Passthrough or whatever it is, is good, even for games. YMMV, I guess.

[Petermint]

You do not say why you need a VM. There are many situations where people recommend VMs for tasks that can run as native applications, under Wine, or as a dual boot. From my experience:
Native applications are best.
Wine rarely works but is way better than a VM when it does work.
Dual boot is far more reliable and is useful when you are working in the other system for hours at a time.

The last choice, a VM, is usually reserved for emulating an external system and often fails to do that.

[Hoser Rob]

I certainly wouldn't want to run Gimp or some large game in a VM unless it was on a very serious piece of hardware. Unfortunately, running games in a Windows VM is exactly the sort of thing you'd want to do if you were a gamer. Fortunately for me I'm not or I'd still have Windows.

[Termy]

I certainly wouldn't want to run Gimp or some large game in a VM unless it was on a very serious piece of hardware. Unfortunately, running games in a Windows VM is exactly the sort of thing you'd want to do if you were a gamer. Fortunately for me I'm not or I'd still have Windows.

For funsies, I decided to install and load up GIMP on my Linux Mint 18.3 VirtualBox VM, with Cinnamon. It was a bit laggy when, for example, I painted stuff, but using filter effects and what-not loaded up just fine. I guess the processing is fine, but visually displaying things was laggy. To be expected, I guess, since it's in software rendering mode, as Mint cautions. I can play videos in YouTube, but they're a lil laggy.

[Petermint]

VMs use from 15% overhead up to 60% or more depending on what you emulate and what you leave to hardware. The high end could be emulating a different processor or a graphics chip. You are back to looking at what the application needs, what the hardware provides, and what the VM may decide to emulate even if it exists in the hardware.

For security, you might decide to emulate I/O instead of letting the application use native I/O.

[RobertService]

So, with all the negatives listed here, can someone please give a good, solid engineering and computer-science-related reason why anyone would want to use a virtual machine?
An example detailing how the use of a VM makes you more productive in your day-to-day work would be the most convincing and compelling.

[Pjotr]

So, with all the negatives listed here, can someone please give a good, solid engineering and computer-science-related reason why anyone would want to use a virtual machine?

- Testing various operating systems, including alpha's and bèta's;
- Updating my TomTom navigation device (needs Windows).

[Petermint]

You can develop for ARM on your Intel processor. You could have a VM for each of the many different types of ARM processor. You can test your Web site using several versions of every Web browser including the difficult ones, Chrome and Internet Exploder.

[Rocky Bennett]

I've been wondering about what tasks are unlikely to work properly when using a virtual machine in Linux Mint 18.3. Can someone tell me if there are any (types of) applications that seem particulary problematic or just flat out don't work as they should (or that need a incredible amount of RAM - i.e. much more than they should normally need - to actually work)?

Thanks in advance.

Have you figured this out yet?