Office PC with running VM's?

ssmacc

ssmacc

ssmacc

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Hello,

A friend needs PC's for his office, although the PC will be mainly used for general office work he also runs "Virtual Machine Workstation"

(as far as I understand a stand alone program enabling him to run some specific software he require for is business).

With this in mind what spec would you recommend? I'm guessing more RAM the better, but not sure about the rest, he'd obviously like it as cheap as possible!

Cheers,
 
I've never understood why a business would use a VM for work? Unless its a software dev. company.
 
Apparently my friend has some catalogue (car parts) that will only run on Windows XP? According to him (I've not seen it in action) he simply installs the VM and Windows XP boots with the catalogue pre-installed...

He's obviously like to run this from a modern PC...

This is what he's told me anyway!

Cheers
 
Yes people do that. I guess it is due to cost/laziness of updating the back end but some industries have not really moved on since the xp era as its working..
 
He is probably using vmware workstation, In the application you can assign resources from the host to any number of running VM's. I have used workstation for testing wsus updates in the past as well as setting up test labs on the fly. I have seen plenty of pre loaded VM's used in various industries, if it's just an xp vm then any i5 laptop with 8 gig of memory will easily run the host smoothly enough as well as fire up workstation with a couple of running vm's.
 
Th0nt said:
Yes people do that. I guess it is due to cost/laziness of updating the back end but some industries have not really moved on since the xp era as its working..
Click to expand...

Workstation is really useful in all kinds of scenarios, even if you are running esxi hosts with a hefty SAN back end, as an admin if you are for example involved in projects like converting estates from physical to virtual you can use workstation to spin up and test VM's offline outside of the live environment before deploying them to a staging or live environment.

The reason you often see these things in car garages spinning up on old laptops is that many of the cables and software made use of the old serial port in order to talk with the cars on board computer and when you start upgrading the software stops working. lots of the old parts catalogs were developed back in the day and have had zero development since. vm's offer a decent way to use all the old software while doing the minimum amount of work.
 
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Thanks for the information everyone, anyone care to knock up a Office PC (just the case and components) capable of running VM Workstation as smoothly and cheaply as possible?

Cheers,
 
Missing some key details before can spec. Rough budget?

Is OS needed? Or keyboard mouse monitor speakers etc? Or just case & intervals?
 
Just need the box, he has Windows Licences / Monitors / Keyboards already.

He'd like them to cost ~£250 or as close as possible if possible!

Thanks,
 
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