i'm looking to build a multi-core system largely for the purpose of virtualisation using the 'free' vmware server, but before i outlay any hard earned i just want to check how it will actually perform. will the 'free' version of vmware actually utilise more than one core, or is the benefit such that vmware will use one of the cores leaving the other available for multi-tasking using different applications?
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question about 'free' virtualisation and multicore cpu's.
- Thread starter atomiser
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i suppose what im getting at is, for example, could i run vmware on windows xp and then perhaps have a 2003 server vm running on one core whilst running a linux distribution on another core? edit: as opposed to making the vm 'dual-core' as i think you might have thought i meant. (if that even makes sense!)
at the moment the budget part of me is saying run an amd dual-core 6000+ whereas the extravagant part of me is saying plump for a core 2 quad! no point in getting the quad though if 2 or 3 of the cores will be sat there idle though!
at the moment the budget part of me is saying run an amd dual-core 6000+ whereas the extravagant part of me is saying plump for a core 2 quad! no point in getting the quad though if 2 or 3 of the cores will be sat there idle though!
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Well we're using the free VMWare server in work for our dev environment, we have iis, sql, tfs etc all on different vmware instances, the box has 8 cores with intel xeon chips. The vmware runs a different instance of vmware-remotemks.exe and vmware-vmx.exe per instance so windows can natuarly select which cores to use per instance, you can actually set the affinity on the vmware-remotemks.exe but doubt you'd really want to. So yeah the free vmware server fully supports running and balancing over multicores althought I think each instance will only emulate a single or dual core cpu depending on how it's configured.
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It will fully utilise both cores.
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Windows will let it use 2 cores or 4 cores if you set 2 instances to use 2 cores each. Windows is not THAT stupid about resource allocation.
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The free VMWare Server app will not let you specify particular VMs to particular cores, it only distributes the load across the cores - you get asked if you want the VM to use one or two processors (maybe three or four if you are quadding) but that's it, no specifying to a particular core.