Virtualization and Battery Life on Thinkpads

[indicium]

I have seen varous reports and threads about how long the battery will last when watching video or browsing the web, but haven't seen anything on running VM's using the battery? I run quite a number of VM's but always on AC and have been thinking about using the battery instead of dragging the adapter along. Does anyone have reports for battery only?

[cdahmedeh]

I'm the user of an X201 and I run VMs (with VirtualBox) on it quite often for testing web servers and the like.

I don't have any hard data, but it seems to me that running VMs usually cuts my battery life in half. I'm pretty sure if you keep your VM under low load, and pause it when not using it, then you might be able to get better battery life.

Perhaps someone else has a more scientific test than I do.

By the way, what VM product are you using? And for what tasks?

Ahmed

[indicium]

I run VMware Workstation 9 with an average of 2 or 3 VM's at time. I normally have 18 different VM's available with a mixture of Windows 7, 8 and xp and Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server and DB2, also various distros of Linux. I also runs nested VM's using ESXi. Some of this is for business but most is for fun.

All this on a T410 with 8 GB Ram and 750 GB HD. I'm looking forward to the new Thinkpads with the Haswell cpu, specifically a Quad Core with 32 GB Ram and Dual HD's.