Qubes OS in Vmware Workstation

General Discussion
1

Hi team,

I have installed the latest version of QubesOS in VMware Workstation. Hardware resources assigned are 10GbRAM, 4CPU cores, 60Gb Nvme.
Do you know why when i performed any operation(start/setting/etc) in any qube, whole machine is freezeing for 10-20 seconds?

2

Qubes isn’t made to be run in a VM. The way Qubes works requires access to bare metal—running nested VMs doesn’t really work.

3

Thanks!
Considering this, 16Gb RAM, 8-core Intel Xeon and a SSD should be enough for a full functionality?

4

This is an unsupported configuration, as you probably know.
Qubes is designed to be installed on bare metal.
That said, I would try to assign more RAM - 10G is not enough

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
5

As long as your CPU is reasonably modern, everything should at least run. RAM will be the deciding factor in how well it runs. 16 GB should be adequate, as long as you aren’t running too many VMs at once.

6

On bare metal, that should be fine.
More memory is always good, and you might find that there are some
limits with 16GB -m it depends very much on what you are trying to do
for “full functionality”.

1 Like
7

Is not the latest configuration:
PC Fujitsu Intel Xeon E3-1230V2(8 Threads) up to 3.7 Ghz, 16 gb ddr3, SSD 240 GB si 2 x HDD 1 TB RAID.
Ready to be upgrated from 16Gb RAM to 32 and an enterprise SSD 960Gb from Kingston
Sounds good?

8

Probably, yeah. The specs certainly seem adequate, and the CPU supports the necessary virtualization functions.

1 Like
9

With the caveat that QubesOS as a guest is not a supportable production configuration (as it negates several security safeguards, and adds other problems).

Qubes as a nested guest relies on the outer hypervisor (such a VMware) to give it the right machine layout and cpu/bios capabilities.

E.g. I found VMware WS on Windows was unable to virtualize QubesOS on AMD Zen CPUs, others have said it works on their Intel CPUs, but that can depend on the physical machine cpu and bios to report things well enough that VMWare can ingest the configuration and map it well to a virtual configuration for the guests.

Anyway…I had good results recently using Linux KVM as the outer hypervisor on the Zen machines. Posted in a recent thread, search for KVM.

B

10

Thanks,
The problem it seems to be generated by the latest version of Vmware Workstation. I have deployed another OS and i faced with the same behaviour(guest freezing)

11

Out of curiosity did you notice a pattern with which guests freeze? Any guest? PVH vs HVM? Linux vs Windows? PCI Passthrough vs not?

B

12

@brendanhoar unfortunatelly not. I have deployed ParrotOS and once i have lanched the update process , whole machine freezed for few seconds. IN QubesOS, once i started a qube-> same behaviour
Hardware resources allocated were in both cases the same: 10Gb RAM, 4 core CPU, SSD 60Gb

13

i have did install qubes os in vmware in the past.
everything is running / started, but not sure about the performance since i only update dom0 only