Best CPU type for VMWare?

[ajf]

Need to spec a PC for using with vmware server.
Windows XP as the host OS.
Obviously plenty of RAM (4Gb+?) but what CPU type is best?

Core 2 Duo - most likely 6300 or 6400
New Dual Core Xeon - i.e 1.86Ghz 3040 or 2.13Ghz 3050
AMD Athlon X2
Opteron - know nothing much about these!
Random option - dual, dual-core Xeons. Probably out of budget though.

Thanks
Andrew

 

[GhostRider]

I've got a e6600 and 2gig of ram and they run fine for me. You'll need to install a 64 bit host operating system if you want 4 gig of ram i believe.

2gig is fine for me but i just program in Fedora, what will you be doing ?

Core 2 is def the best chip and you can overclock to e6600 speed easily with a good motherboard like the gigabyte ds3 or Asus p5n-e-sli.

 

[joeyjojo]

Conroe is fastest. Depending on budget and requirements you might prefer getting a xeon/opteron (server chips).

 

[SlightOC]

I've ran a 4 node Exchange cluster on my e6300@3Ghz +2Gb RAM with no probs.
Mind you, having 3 hard Disks helps.

 

[ajf]

Thank you for the replies.
Will scale back the memory a bit tperhaps. Was going to run 3 Windows 2003 servers and 2 XP Pro and maybe 1 Vista for testing.

How do multiple harddisks help?

Andrew

 

[SlightOC]

The virtual disks where on different drives for performance, without it it ran like a dog and I got disk errors on server failover.
The Exchange setup was 4 servers, with 2 active nodes with 3 log and 3 data disks.(Thats 10 disks!). The virtual front end server was on my linux box

My e6300 has ran mulitple VMs:
solaris jumpstarting other vms
fedora kickstarting other vms
xp windows RIS on other VMs.
Longhorn server and Vista run fine too.

All on a DS4+E6300+2Gb Ram running XP (isn't too shabby)

 

[joeyjojo]

That's a lot of virtual machines Nice!

 

[InSanCen]

I ran 20 VM's on an X2-4400, 2GB, 12 (IIRC) Hard Disks, ... mind you, the OS in question, had a 44MB footprint. It was for DIMES (A DC Projest that maps t'internet), and you could only run 1 instance per OS. and god, it was sloooooooowww....

 

[Nick Xero]

depends on how intense you want to go really - for more performance hungry apps in tests the Opteron performs better than the Xeon (like for like), however Dell have just proved that by using the quad Clovertowns instead of Opterons you can achieve a major performance per watt increase at a lower price.