I appreciate your help.
I have been evaluating Workstation 10 on my Asus Q550LF (i7-4500U, 16gig ram, 256 gig SSD, 1T HD) in a Windows 8 environment. I operate my own business without an IT department. I would like to use this notebook for both business (mostly MS office, web, and a few proprietary legal applications) and personal (web, multimedia, gaming). However, I also need my business machine to be reliable. VM Workstation seems like it will allow me to accomplish this goal. I installed VM Workstation (trial) on my notebook and created separate VMs for my office (vmWork) and personal (vmPersonal) use. I installed MS Office on vmWork which appears to work although sometimes slowly.
I have a couple of specific questions.
1. Is my notebook sufficient to handle two or three vms running simultaneously (i.e. outlook, word, and chrome running on vmWork) and (gmail, chrome, and a youtube running on the other) without performance problems.
2. I noticed that Workstation 10 for windows is only 32 bit. Won't that slow applications down ? Should I wait for a 64 bit version to come out?
3. Is VM overkill in this situation? I like the idea of isolating my work applications from my personal applications. But I am worried that the performance of the applications will suffer too much. For example, Outlook has been hanging when performing operations that should be relatively simple such as searching for unread email.
vmWork is configured with 4 gb ram, 2 processors, 2 cores, bridged network (though I've tried it with 1 processor and 1 core without apparent impact on performance).
vmPersonal is configured with 6 gb ram, 1 processor, 1 core, bridged network (this appears to run fine and can even run a computer game).
Thanks in advance for your advice and time.
Dan