Virtualization on T420

[Berator]

Hi,

I am thinking about buying a thinkpad for work, and I want one with
a real keyboard, I am absolutely not comfortable with the keyboard of
the T450 I got now. My plan is running Siemens TIA Portal inside a
simulated Windows 10, on top either of Xen or qemu.

Has anybody tried that, will it work, is it a bad idea at all?


regards,
der Berator

[axur-delmeria]

I honestly cannot recommend buying a 14-year-old laptop for serious work. Due to its age, it can die any time, and you lose work and money as a result.

[Berator]

Yeah, thanks. But the question was meant as: Will the virtualization work?

It's probably meant as an honest warning, but I don't see what the
age of the hardware has to do with data loss. Most of the machines
I program with it are a lot older. Of course you have to have backup,
preferably a mirrored machine.


regards
Der Berator

[axur-delmeria]

If your T450 can run it in a VM, then the T420 should be able to-- CPU performance is similar between them, after all, and 2nd gen Core i5's do have virtualization-specific features (VT-x, VT-d). Unless the software in question (Siemens TIA Portal) has specific requirements (AVX2 instructions, Vulkan, etc.) that the T420 doesn't meet.

That said, I'd probably pick a T520 with quad-core i7 instead. It uses the same keyboard, and the additional CPU cores give you more headroom in case the software is too heavy for a dual-core CPU.