How many CPU cores and RAM on VMware Player for Photoshop?

Question

How much RAM and CPU core should I allocate for my VMware Player with Windows 7 x64 as Guest OS?

My System Specs:

• Ubuntu 12.10 x64
• Intel i7 @ 2.20 GHz (4 cores + hyper-threading)
• 8GB RAM
• 750 HDD
• Intel HD 4000 Graphics

My main purpose for the virtual machine is for Adobe Photoshop.

Solution

If you want the best possible performance inside the VM, then I don't see any reason not to give it all you like.

3GB RAM and the maximum number of virtual cores (8) would be fine.

On the other hand, if it's important that your VM occupies fewer resources because you want to use other VMs at the same time or you want to run it in the background all the time while you use the host OS, then give it fewer resources.

Comments

[Web-E]

4Gig RAM & 4 core will do I think. But the problem will be GPU. As VMPlayer emulates the graphics hardware you will probably miss Hardware accelerated feature. It also depends on Photoshop version.

[kiko]

If I would give all the 8 cores into the VM, will my host suffer? Because I will be doing my designs inside the VM with photoshop at the same time coding inside ubuntu, plus LAMP coz' I'm doing wordpress themes. Also, this will only be my VM.

[thomasrutter]

While the VM is idle, performance on the host won't suffer much and while the host is idle, it obviously doesn't matter, so this would only really affect times where the VM and the host (or other VMs) are both using enough CPU time to compete with each other. While the VM is using CPU then giving it more cores will (potentially, if your applications are multi-threaded) allow it to complete its work faster, while give it fewer cores will make it take longer to do its work, while allowing the host or other VMs to use more CPU time.