Two operating systems or a virtual machine

[stockzahn]

Dear all,

my PC runs on Windows 10. In the near future I will have to perform some simulations with Open FOAM. I've already done that some years ago (Windows 7 and I used a virtual machine to be able to run Ubuntu/Open FOAM). My experiences were that the program was executed very slow (despite allocating a large fraction of my RAM). Therefore I wanted to ask, if you could give some advice, if I should install two operating systems to increase the performance or if you maybe could recommend a "virtual machine" for this kind of application. I've also read that in Windows 10 there is the possibility to run Open FOAM without Linux/Ubuntu or a virtual machine - maybe this is the best option...?

Thanks in advance,
stockzahn

 

[.Scott]

Obviously, the VM would allow you to run Windows programs (Word, email, whatever) while you run your simulations. This may be a valuable convenience. It's really your choice. I've done it both ways - not with Ubuntu in the VM, but with other OS configurations.

 

[stockzahn]

That's of course true, I would be able to use the two OSs more or less at the same time - a big pro for the VM-option. Nevertheless, do you or does anyone already gained experience with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)?

 

[robphy]

If you don't really need to use Windows 10 while your simulations run,
you might try to avoid installation by using a livecd that has OpenFOAM
(e.g. https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Installation/Live_Images
https://www.google.com/search?q=OpenFOAM+distrowatch )

 

[newjerseyrunner]

The performance of your VM depends very heavily on what the underlying system is doing. I manage a bunch of servers, all of which have two VMs on them and run onto of a Xen operating system. They work lightning fast and there is no reason that a modern VM should run slowly. My guess is that it was your hard drive that was being bad. When Windows wants to write to the drive, it does a lot of smart stuff to make sure things are written efficiently. When running two OSs at the same time, they may each want to write to different sectors of the same physical disk so if you have a magnetic hard drive (which I'm guessing you had since you said it was a few years ago) it'll cause shoddy performance. If you have an SSD, you should not have this problem.