I dont think Claude itself needs much, its more like what you do with it. In my case it is doing some gradle builds and java tests with some postgres docker containers inside the vm so I gave it max 8G RAM with 4 cores and have no issues. I share my workspace folder (with virtiofs and also the user home so I can rebuild the vm from scratch and keep settings) because I like my tools on the host and my full creds are outside and I didnt want to keep syncing branches. I access it with ssh (with passt). So far no real issues.