It's time once again for our Friday tip. Our question today is about how to determine how much video RAM to allocate for your virtual machines in a VDI deployment:

Question:
How much video RAM do I really need on my VirtualBox VMs?

Answer by John Renko, Consulting Developer, Oracle:
The answer is in the VirtualBox admin guide but it's seldom followed correctly, usually resulting in excess unused RAM to be allocated. The formula for determining how much RAM to allocate is shown below for a 32 bit fullscreen 22" monitor supporting 1680x1050:

bit depth / 8 x horizontal res x vertical res / 1024 / 1024 = MB RAM

Which translates to:

32 bits / 8 x 1680 x 1050 / 1024 / 1024 = 6.7 MB

If you wanted to support dual 22" monitors, you would need twice that, so 13.4 MB.

Anything in excess of what is needed is readily allocated but not used and would be better suited for running more VMs!

Thanks John, that tip should help folks squeeze a little more out of their VDI servers. And remember, if you have a question for us, use hash tag #AskOracleVirtualization on Twitter.

We'll see you next week with another tip!

-Chris