Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Windows guest OS hanging in VirtualBox running on Ubuntu Linux 12.10

I am really enjoying using my portable PC as a developer workstation and it certainly has increased my productivity. I upgraded to an A10-5800K and retained the 128GB SSD but I lament that I only put 8GB of RAM into it instead of the maximum 16GB. I still like to lug around my 22 inch Acer LED and if I ever went back to a laptop I would still carry it as an extended screen.

 I recently purchased a Windows 7 ultimate license key and wanted to activate it in VirtualBox so that I could have multiple authenticate versions in different configurations for different projects/clients while using Ubuntu as the host OS. If I was more adventurous and knew more about Xen I would run Ubuntu as a hypervisor. In any event recently on both my AMD FX-8350 workstation and this AMD A-10 Ubuntu completely locks up and I have to hard reboot the machine. These lockups more often than not happen during startup. In this day in age it is extremely annoying.  This happened after I activated Windows 7 and I expressed some choice words. After trying serveral settings tweaks I I enabled host I/O cache on the controller and that seemed to fix the lockups. Since the change I have rebooted serveral times, IO intensive operations, and no lockups. I also enabled SSD for the virtual harddrive since the VM is running on a SSD drive in the host. I believe this is a new feature with Virtualbox. I also remembered to disable paging and defragmentation in the guest OS it increase performance and preserved the SSD. Virtualization with throw away OSes is the way to go!!!