spec check for vmware...

[atomiser]

please critique this spec:

please bear in mind that the machine is primarily for vmware purposes for a dev environment to be used for certification purposes. i've gone for two hard drives and 4gb of ram in the first instance - one hard drive for the host os and another for guest os's. the intentions are to add an additional hard drive and another 4gb of ram in due course.

i've gone for the m-atx motherboard for the on-board graphics. i've also gone for the hdmi version of that motherboard as i will likely cascade this down to htpc duties in a few years time once i have replaced my crt tv. (my old athlon xp 3200 with 2gb ram is in the process of being cascaded down!)

i've been umming and ahhing between amd / intel for quite a while now, and i'm not averse to overclocking so if you can come up with more bang for the buck out of an overclocked intel machine then let me have your suggestions!

many thanks in advance.

edit: i ought to have mentioned that i already have keyboard, mouse, and tft. that said, these will only be used for initial setup as i plan to remote control everything from my laptop once i have the base o/s and drivers installed.

edit2: also, if you are able to come up with a more bang for the buck solution don't feel that you have to be tied to m-atx with onboard graphics - the case will take an atx board, and obviously being a vmware machine just lob in the cheapest graphics you can find so long as it's dedicated memory and not this hyper-memory rubbish that steals system memory!

 

[m_cozzy]

Case - superb, I have one for my server & the rubber hd mounts make it very very quiet.

4GB is a reasonable amount, im up to about 6 permanent vmware images now & am looking at going to 8gb very soon.

160gb disk, will that be big enough? Maybe better get a 500gb one to start with.I havent looked but bet they are around £65 these days.

AMD cpu - never had one so cannot comment. I did however upgrade my E4400 to a Q6600 quad not so long ago as I was noticing performance issues with the slower cpu.

Motherboard- I went intel matx, Doesnt over clock, doesnt need to, its a server. 100% stable.

Base os is 2003 x64 server. Good luck with whatever you choose.

 

[atomiser]

AMD cpu - never had one so cannot comment. I did however upgrade my E4400 to a Q6600 quad not so long ago as I was noticing performance issues with the slower cpu.

hi m_cozzy, thanks for your reply, i'm particularly interested in the bit above. whats the pattern on processor utilisation on a c2q compared to a c2d. i posted in the cpu specific forum and the consensus was (albeit after only a few people had had a chance to reply) that the free version of vmware would not utilise more than one core. as this is pretty much going to be a dedicated vmware box, plus maybe a few other odds and ends that i would maybe want to leave running, i'm not sure i see the point in the massive increase in price to have a few cores sat idle most of the time. i would greatly appreciate your first hand experience on this. cheers.

 

[m_cozzy]

I dont think there is a problem with vmware server using all 4 cores. You can specify each instance use 2 logical cores if required & I would guess the os balances the load over all available cores.
During intensive use on the e4400 both cores ran at about 95%. With the q6600 this dropped to about 25% across the 4 and brought the server back to life again! I could run 4 vmware instances or so with the c2d, currently running 7 on the quad but the limit now is the 4gb or ram.
Seems a lot of people get a quad because thats the thing to have, whether it is of any benefit to most applications is open to question. In my experience running vmware with a quad makes a massive difference to how many virtual instances you can host.

 

[IronFire]

As pointed out try and stretch for a quad core, it will make a world of difference when you are running multiple VMs. Secondly one of the bigest VM performance killers is I/O. So if your running VMs with moderate load you will need multiple disks. Finally throw a few more network cards in there if your doing anything network based as they are handy and go buy VMware Workstation 6!

 

[Godsbrother]

I dont think there is a problem with vmware server using all 4 cores. You can specify each instance use 2 logical cores if required & I would guess the os balances the load over all available cores.
During intensive use on the e4400 both cores ran at about 95%. With the q6600 this dropped to about 25% across the 4 and brought the server back to life again! I could run 4 vmware instances or so with the c2d, currently running 7 on the quad but the limit now is the 4gb or ram.
Seems a lot of people get a quad because thats the thing to have, whether it is of any benefit to most applications is open to question. In my experience running vmware with a quad makes a massive difference to how many virtual instances you can host.

We run VMWare VI3 in a live production enviroment on multiple servers running quad dual core cpu's not quite the same I know but the limit we always hit before cpu is memory and we have 32GB in each host.

I would get the Quad and at 'least' 4GB (cheap as chips at the mo) If you look about you can get quad based systems for not all that much more than that which you have spec'd

 

[atomiser]

how about this instead?
(i've no idea why the price or line total's are zero'd!)
(also, bear in mind when comparing this to the other spec, that i have upped the secondary hard drive to 500gb, and there is 8gb of ram in this spec).