Stop giving too many vCPUs to your Kali VM

I’ve been using VMware and virtualization software since 2005. And the amount of progress that virtualization has made since then is mind blowing. But almost 20 years later, people keep making the same mistakes again and again: giving too many vCPUs or too much RAM to their Linux or Windows VMs. This is also true for students who plan to use a Kali VM for OSCP exam. Keep reading and find out why less is sometimes more.

More is not always better. Not for VMs. And assigning more vCPUS or RAM to a Kali VM It’s a common mistake ; people think that it will automatically make things go faster. While this might seem logical at first glance, the truth is that over-allocation can lead to unexpected performance bottlenecks.

VMware and other virtualization platforms don’t work the same way as physical hardware. When you assign a VM 4 or 8 vCPUs, the hypervisor must find an equal number of physical cores on the host machine to execute the VM’s tasks. If your host machine is running other processes or VMs, this can create a queue, slowing everything down.

For the OSCP exam, there are only a handful of activities that might demand more CPU power:

• Cracking Passwords: Tools like hashcat or john can be CPU-intensive, but these tools are more efficient with GPU support than with additional CPUs.