How many simultaneous VMs could I run on a MBP w/8GB of RAM and still have good performance? [closed]

"Performance is really hard to judge without knowing a lot more.

Modern computers are so fast, the real limitation of virtualisation at the moment comes from hard drive I/O.

I have a T9300 CPU and 4GB's of memory, I can run about 8 - 10 VMs when I do cluster testing with Linux where each VM hardly uses any I/O and I can run them without any sort of slow downs, where as when I am doing benchmarking or similar reviewing, it can instantly slow down the entire machine from just having one VM open.

So, it depends what you are planning on doing... Personally, for every day usage, you shouldn't have a problem as your specification seems higher than what I use, and I am able to do what you want."

"I have a VMware server running on a Linux system with 8G memory, and it happily hosts about a dozen virtual machines, mostly Linux, but a 1G OpenSolaris VM and a 2G Windows 7 VM as two of the biggest resource usage.

I think you'll be fine with a MBP running OS X and VMware Fusion, assuming:

~2G for Windows 7.
~1G for Arch Linux.
~1G? for Other?

Hard to say for sure about 'other' but 1G should run most operating systems just fine in a VM. The rest of the memory, ~4G will be sufficient for Snow Leopard and your regular desktop applications."