M3 iMac 24g RAM overkill for Linux VMs?

[emembee]

I am seriously considering M3 iMac as i prefer a one stop solution with a bigger screen than a Laptop. I currently have a fusion drive intel 2019 21 inch and it is too slow to run VMs on it.

I inten to run Linux as potentially 2 VMs , with occasional Windows only. Does anyone have experience with VMs on iMac, do you think 16g RAM is enough to run 2 VMs plus the usual MacOs or should I go for the max 24g?

I do not run video or content creative stuff but maybe will do some Dev work in the future.

Thanks for any ideas or insights.

 

[redheeler]

What do you plan to do with the Linux VMs, and which distribution of Linux are you planning to run? There are some very lightweight Linux-based containers if you just need something like a web server.

 

[chrfr]

I am seriously considering M3 iMac as i prefer a one stop solution with a bigger screen than a Laptop. I currently have a fusion drive intel 2019 21 inch and it is too slow to run VMs on it.

I inten to run Linux as potentially 2 VMs , with occasional Windows only. Does anyone have experience with VMs on iMac, do you think 16g RAM is enough to run 2 VMs plus the usual MacOs or should I go for the max 24g?

I do not run video or content creative stuff but maybe will do some Dev work in the future.

Thanks for any ideas or insights.

Keep in mind that the Linux variants you'd be running on the M3 iMac are arm64 not Intel, in case that has some effect on whether or not these VMs would work in your usage.

 

[emembee]

Initially just some training to learn about it so nothing heavy but will be Red Hat or CentOs and potentially SQL Server or mySQL (don’t want to run these on Mac). Quite a lot of mucking about with VM transfers too and restoring snapshots so just querying if I should max out the RAM.

i think Linux has ARM options so not worried about that, though Windows is a different matter, but I have found VMWare to be the best so far for compatibility and performance.

 

[AlmightyKang]

If you've got an iMac I assume it'll be networked tethered all the time. You would probably do better to use the iMac as a terminal and just spin up a VM in a cloud provider when you need it for experimenting. You can then choose to spend the money you'd have to burn on the RAM for the Mac on other things (cloud fees!)

I do this inside AWS. Occasional VM use (about 3-4 hours a week running a windows VM for some stats software), hosting my DNS and my.domain in S3/CloudFront CDN is costing me around this every month... $0.60 of that is the static fee for the domain in Route53.

Advantage of doing it in a cloud provider, particularly AWS is you can attach your VMs to a virtual network (subnet) and use that which is a PITA in any desktop virtualization software.

Edit: oh you can choose how much RAM you need every time you start something as well. I can allocate up to 1.5TB of it if I am feeling rich!

 

[redheeler]

Initially just some training to learn about it so nothing heavy but will be Red Hat or CentOs and potentially SQL Server or mySQL (don’t want to run these on Mac). Quite a lot of mucking about with VM transfers too and restoring snapshots so just querying if I should max out the RAM.

i think Linux has ARM options so not worried about that, though Windows is a different matter, but I have found VMWare to be the best so far for compatibility and performance.

For Windows 11 I'd probably get 24 GB, at least that way you can allocate 8 GB to the VM and be certain you'll never run into a low memory state. (I haven't tried to run Windows 11 on 4 GB but I'd imagine it's not a great experience - then again it's just a VM so that matters less).

None of this would be an issue if Apple allowed upgrades later on. Either you get an amount that's probably overkill now, or you're stuck forever.