Spec me a cheap, fast system for VMware

kirkster

kirkster

kirkster

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Been away from machine building for a while....

I need 16 G of memory. 32 would be better but I can live with 16. Fast CPU but does not need to be the fastest. i5 is OK.

Cheapest possible graphics card. It will never be used after VMware installed. Could I use my GT8800 graphics just to get VMware installed maybe?

I already have hard disks.

Needs a case and PSU. Cheapest possible that's reasonable.

Ideally I want the whole lot for £300 tops. Cheaper if poss but prepared to pay £300.

Appreciate advice and guidance please?

Steve
 
Meant to say it does not have to be Intel and on board graphics would be fine. This machine will never get near a game. So I just need memory and CPU speed as my priorities. I could actually also reuse an existing case and PSU. I do not need any OS/Optical etc.
 
have a look at the price of 16gb and 32gb of memory and ask your self if you can get an set up.

No!

i5 is £150
Board £100
16gb memory £100+
 
£350+p&p is possible, but choices are very limited. The case is probably terrible, and the motherboard only has VGA and HDMI. You don't need a GPU.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4460 3.20GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £139.99
1 x GeIL Black Dragon 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (GD316GB1333C9DC) **OcUK Exclusive** £119.99
1 x MSI H81M-E33 Intel H81 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £34.99
1 x SuperFlower Amazon 300W "80 Plus Bronze" Power Supply £31.99
1 x Zalman T1U3 Mini-Tower USB 3.0 - Black £20.99
Total : £361.45 (includes shipping : £11.25).

 
ThaReaperGuy said:
Question is, what HDD's do you have?

As they'll be the biggest factor to the system feeling slow.
Click to expand...

Agreed. IOPS IOPS IOPS and then IOPS.
VMware ESX is very good at memory page sharing so although lots of RAM is good, it's not essential as you can over commit by quite a lot without the balloon driver going spaz. HDD speed however is the biggest killer of performance.
 
I work in networking myself and 80 percent of time slowness issue is due to the drives, 15 percent the ram and 5 percent the processor if that. Time to invest in atleast raid 5 SAS 15k drives and cry at the price as those alone break your budget. 10k even still probably use up the whole budget.
 
By VMWare, I presume you mean ESXi?
You haven't really stated what you'll use it for, but in general I'll echo what everyone else has said; disk is usually the biggest bottleneck, more memory is always good, and CPU is of the least concern.

One thing that hasn't been stated is that ESXi is fussy about it's NICs. You need to make sure whatever you buy is on the VMWare HCL.
If it isn't you'll need to shell out a bit more for this, Intel Pro 1000's tend to be popular for this kind of build.
 
Thanks guys for the input. Maybe £300 is being a bit optimistic. I could stretch it to £400 at a push.
I have a case and decent Seasonic PSU already and a shed load of 500G drives. I could create a RAID array if needs be? I don't want to spend money on a RAID controller though, I'd want to do it from the MB if I went that way. I also run ESXi on another machine and performance is OK from just the one disk 7200rpm. This is not running production services.

The machine is to act as a whitebox ESXi 5.1 server for learning various Microsoft server technologies and for running some Cisco Network management applications for learning. Mega performance is not that important though it needs to be usable. I want to spin up some Windows 2008 servers and some Win7 clients. That's why I thought I'd want a lot of memory. You think I am going OTT with 32G?
I was thinking an i5 with VT-d and VT-x and a matching motherboard. Built in graphics is fine, they'll never be used.
I already have an Intel PRO-1000 NIC that is supported on the Vmware HAL so that is sorted too.

Appreciate your input please, it's more CPU/Mem and ram that i want.
Steve
 
Last edited:
As already been said, your biggest bottleneck regardless of hardware specs is going to be disk IOPs so as SSD really would be advised
 
I think that would work well.

I'm going to be unpopular here and also suggest an AMD 8320 system. It won't be as fast in low threaded apps but if you are stressing all the VMs at the same time then the additional cores will be useful.

Another option is a used x79 based Intel system or even a used x58 Xeon based system (good thread in the CPU forum about these).
 
Get a second hand i7 system, I reckon you could get an i7 920 and reasonable mobo with dual LAN and 6 DDR3 slots for £100, throw in an SSD and then load it with 4GB modules as your budget allows, maybe start with 12GB and work up to 24.

That's what I'm using and it works brilliantly. Even supports pass through of pcie devices.
 
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