I’m on a new 13" Librem, 30gb of ram. I was hoping a could use virtual machines heavily for sandboxing. But when I start a virtual machine, even with all that ram, the fans start to go crazy & the machine lags.
Am I missing optimisations or mis-configured something… or is this the common experience for others?
I’ve had no fan problems on my Librem 13, but apparently other people have.
You might check these forum threads:
CPU fan stuck at high speed sometimes
Fan full blast after sleep, coreboot and Intel ME
Librem 13 v3 - Fan spin up at wake
Good luck. 
What you’re describing sounds like a fan ramping up under load. This is normal and expected behavior.
VMs are emulating a computer and allowing another OS to run on it. Depending on the hardware settings of that vritual machine, you might be taking a lot of resources from your current host OS.
Good rule of thumb is to limit CPU/threads and RAM to the bare minimum.
RAM will not cause your machine to run slowly unless you’ve given so much to your VM that the host OS can’t do paging, etc.
If you like us to help you here, can you tell us more about the VMs you are trying to run and their settings?
I’m going to be running Windows, OSX, an a host of Linux distros.
Primary purpose: Sandbox higher risk software to their own VMS & firewall the VM network inputs & outputs.
I need the base OS to be optimized to run VMS. First test is PureOS. Are there better ones?
I need a fast virtualizer, that gives plenty of options for network firewalling, and can run Windows, and OSX.
What are the best candidates for something like this?
What you are intending to do is one of the primary reasons Qubes OS was made. I would suggest you look at that.
I second the qubes suggestion. I can run 3 vms effortlessly on an i5 16gb dell. No such fan drama with that setup. Mind you, I have become a total qubes convert. Great system.
A cursory look at Qubes, its just what i’m looking for. Any tutorials available setting it up to jive with the hardware key & Pureboot? Ideally I could use the hardware key pin to streamline logins & security on Qubes, like it does Pureos. Has this been your experience?
I, unfortunately, have never used Qubes. I just recently tried installing it on a x230, but am having problems at boot. This has to do with Secure Boot, etc.
Installing it on a Librem is supposed to be straight forward, although I’m not sure how it would handle the Librem Key. (If they have a wizard that walks you threw setting it up for Qubes)
The CTO of Purism uses it on both of his Librem laptops, and reports that it works flawlessly.
You are booting in legacy? I have no problems with secure boot. Its a legacy boot.