Do you think my rig is "strong" enough to virtualize?

[Shaye87]

Hello
I am starting my MCITP studies next week and we've been told we'll need to practice a lot at home too, so I assume instead of going and buying some hardware and turn my room into a mess, I would just virtualize using VMware (Already got a copy of the workstation).
My rig is as below (Taken off xfire profile):

Do you think that I need to upgrade anything? I assume that I will need to run at least 3 virtual machines at once, 1 server 2008, 2 vista.

Thanks.

 

[zetec452]

I've got a similar PC and it runs 4/5 VM's for testing.

 

[atomiser]

i would recommend you getting an additional hard drive to run your vm 'images' from.

would also be interested to see how you get on with vmware in vista... couldn't get it working over here (two attempts) since it wouldn't accept the additional networks that vmware installs.

i had a couple of attempts to mend it, including hacking the registry, but didn't have any joy. ended up going back to xp.

 

[sparkey196]

As long as your CPU has hardware virtualisation support (Intel VT or AMD-V), and you have enough RAM for all the guest Operating Systems, you will be fine.

Given that RAM is so cheap now, it would certainly be worth upgrading to 8GB+. The vista/2008 instances really need 2GB each and that is before you start running any hefty services on them.

 

[zetec452]

If you are going to use VMWare on Vista you'll need VMWare-Server version 2. Version 1 doesn't like vista all that much.

 

[mr.bond]

i would recommend you getting an additional hard drive to run your vm 'images' from.

would also be interested to see how you get on with vmware in vista... couldn't get it working over here (two attempts) since it wouldn't accept the additional networks that vmware installs.

i had a couple of attempts to mend it, including hacking the registry, but didn't have any joy. ended up going back to xp.

You get it working by disabling driver signing on boot. Painful as you have to do it each time you power up. None of the tech notes I've read get around this.

 

[paradigm]

If you are going to use VMWare on Vista you'll need VMWare-Server version 2. Version 1 doesn't like vista all that much.

Never had a problem with v1, v2 on the other hand was buggy as sin.

 

[pjansell]

Could always get a cheap quad as well, i'm sure that would help out a lot.

 

[awaybreaktoday]

HP ProLiant ML110 G5
Stick 8GB of non ECC ram in it
Download ESXi server which is free and away you go.

I have a Xeon quad core ML310 with 8GB of non ECC ram running ESXi server with 4 750GB disk in there and 10 VMs.

 

[morfmedia]

The ML110 are no longer rock bottom cheap. Original box will be fine for a few test machines....