Virtual machine host spec

philjayj · 5 May 2008 at 21:53

Hi Guys

I am looking to put a virtual machine host system together, and thought I would stop by and ask for some advice.

I want to build the physical machine, and run about 4 virtual machines off it. The machine will run a mixture of Server 2003/08, Vista and XP Pro OSs - and SQL Server 2005 will most likely be installed on one of those.

Now I know that the more RAM the better (I was looking at buying 8GB of DDR2) and dedicated hard drives for each virtual machine, but is there anything else you can recommend that would increase the performance of each virtual machine?

I already have a motherboard - its an Intel DG33TL.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

philjayj · 5 May 2008 at 22:26

Mogwai, thanks for replying. Although I do have a licence for ESX, the hardware requirements are way beyond my budget - I believe it requires dual CPUs etc. I think for the time being I will just use VMware Virtual Server.

philjayj · 8 May 2008 at 20:28

Thanks for your reply Gazza. Its not a production machine, it will be mainly for pre-production testing etc.

At the most, I will have about 4 or 5 VMs running off the host machine. These will include basic setups such as Windows XP or Vista Ultimate. But I will also have VMs running Windows Server 2003/2008 with SQL Server 2005 installed on them.

Although the system will be for pre-production testing, some of the test SQL databases are a few hundred GBs. So with that in mind, I would want to avoid any slow response times.

I have been told that dedicating each VM its own hard drive is a good way to go - maybe a Raptor? And also give each VM its own dedicated NIC - i'm not sure about the dedicated NIC because I cant see myself saturating the bandwidth of a NIC.

Oh, and I do have a licence for VMware ESX - but from what I understand, what is essentially a desktop PC acting as a server is not enough to run ESX?

What do you think on the above?

Many thanks

philjayj · 8 May 2008 at 22:10

m cozzy, am I right in saying that ESx 3i replaces the need for an operating system (such as Windows Server 2003) on the host machine?

Thanks

philjayj · 8 May 2008 at 22:58

Does the virtual infrastructure client install onto the host when I install ESX? Also, when I donwload ESX, should I download ESX or ESXi?

Thanks for your help.