VMWare server

snowbhoy

snowbhoy

snowbhoy

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Joined
31 Aug 2006
Posts
10
Guys,

Looking to build myself a box to be sued as a VMWare server. Really just after reasonable proc and a decent amount of memory for as little outlay as possible.

Any suggestions - should I try build myself or buy a system from somewhere else (Old stock or something)?

Cheers.
 
What you intending to run on it?

Ive got 10+ Linux virtual machines running on a £300 pre-built desktop and have no problems whatsoever.
 
I have a x2 3800+ running Centos 5 and provides me with the following.

1 x Linux Webserver
1 x Windows Desktop
1 x Windows Desktop for work
1 x Vista test

And Could probably load it more if I had more than 2gb's of memory. Speed is fine and I access it all via either the console or "Remote Admin".
 
with vmware the ram and disk i/o are your bottlenecks.

on-board graphics because well, it's a vmware server...

half decent cooling so i can try and overclock in the future for a 'free' boost in performance,

quad core because i want flexibility, multitasking and they have just come down in price a little since i last looked,

8gb of ram because i want to be able to either run lots of small vm's, a few big ones or alternatively a mix of the two,

two hard drives to maximise i/o - one for the o/s, another for the vm's and i already have an additional 500gb for 'other' storage,

a quick but quiet dvd drive,

a half decent case with reasonable acoustics to keep the noise down.

last time i was looking at doing this the specs were coming out at around £100 more.

edit: i should probably mention that in addition to typical windows and linux desktops and servers, i am also looking to virtualise firewalls and network appliances too which is why im beefing up the specs a bit.
 
oh and Vmware Server runs much better on Linux so hope you using that as your host. Plus always specify host CPU-1 to the VM's.

eg: Host has 2 CPU's so only give the Vm's 1 CPU. or a Quad give them 2 or 3.

Maybe get another drive and strip for better performance if you going to run VM's. one head will have contention.
 
Ram and disk will be the main thing, CPU rarely an issue cause you don't virtual CPU intensive machines generally :)
 
Purchase a lot of RAM. The more the better, just make sure your host machine is 64-bit. Citrix will eat the machine.
 
Guys,

What about this spec - bear in mind it's purely for my home use and playing around with callmanager and setting up a citrix server - trying to keep costs minimal.

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 "LGA775 Allendale" 2.20GHz (800FSB)
Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H GeForce 7100 Micro-ATX (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Antec NSK 4480 Mini Tower Case (Silver) - 380W Earth Watts PSU
Samsung SH-S203D 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM
OcUK 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Kit
Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775)
Netgear WG311 54Mbps Wireless Desktop PCI Network Adapter
 
I like the look of the quad core spec above, any ideas on what to buy for a cheap little box to run openfiler iscsi services on to partner up with it? I guess some nice gig nics would not go amiss so I could vlan it all off into a cheap and cheerful san?

Anyone have a recommendation to share?

Cheers.
 
mattyrigby00 said:
only the 6xxx, 8xxx and 9xxx cpu's do virtualization
Click to expand...

What are the implications of not having virtualization support in hardware? I didn't really think it was an issue except when using microsoft software on a virtual machine?

Edit: wikipedia's cleared it up :)

VMware and similar virtualization software for the x86 must employ very sophisticated techniques to trap and virtualize the execution of certain instructions. These techniques incur some performance overhead as compared to a VM running on a natively virtualizable architecture such as the IBM System/370 or Motorola MC68020.

...

The research systems Denali, L4, and Xen explored ways to provide high performance virtualization of x86 by implementing a virtual machine that differs from the raw hardware. Operating systems are ported to run on the resulting virtual machine, which does not implement the hard-to-virtualize parts of the actual x86 instruction set. This technique is known as paravirtualization. As of 3.0 Xen also now supports full virtualization with an unmodified guest OS provided hardware virtualisation support (i.e., Intel VT or AMD-V) is available.
Click to expand...
 
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