On my new Thinkpad W530 with 32 GB RAM and dual 500GB SSD, I am running multiple virtual machines using VMware 9 workstation. So far, I have tested 6 VMs running with a resonable performance. My aim is to run DB2 pureScale using minimum 4 VMs and 2 VMs for the applications.
Few things that I am doing differently on this machine.
I have abandoned the use of Norton Antivirus and Windows defender completely from my host and other services so that I have bare minimum things running on my laptop. Without an anti-virus software, how do I make sure that I protect my computer when I go to the internet.
I set a rules for myself that I will never surf internet from my host Windows 8 machine. I simply have a self-imposed rule to not to do it.
I created a 1GB RAM Virtual Machine running Ubuntu 12.04 and installed flash plugin in Firefox. I installed VMware tools so that I can easily copy files to and fro between host and VM. I took a VM snapshot of the machine.
When I need to use the internet, I just use this small VM and I have a vmrun script that resets the snapshot before I start the machine. So, hackers and people trying to break-in are just limited to this Linux based VM. Once the VM is reset, it is set to original state as if nothing happened.
Another rule that I set for myself is not to download any so called free software from untrusted sites that I need to run on my Windows host machine.
So far, I am doing well with this setup. I am sure that there are many people who use this approach and I added mysefl to that club.
I am liking my dual 500GB SSD setup and boot up time is very fast and all of my VM start very quickly. I wish that in future, I could just use a bare metal Linux hipervisor and run all of my VM as KVM machines but VMware is darn good with its capabilities especially with its ability to keep the vmdk file size as small as possible and still showing the full size which I specified during install.