What system to run several VMs on a budget?

Trojan

Trojan

Trojan

Soldato
Joined
19 Sep 2003
Posts
5,319
Location
Adelaide, Australia
I've recently started contracting as a sys admin and whilst I'm fine and happy with Server 2k3 and below, I've not used Server 2k8 whatsoever yet. Given the fact that I'm contracting rather than working a perm job, I would like to address this before I come across 2k8 in a production environment. To this end, I want to build a system that will be used primarily for testing with VMWare virtuals. The inital setup will be an XP host running 3 VMs - a 2k8 DC, a 2k8 member server and a Windows 7 client. What then, realistically, is the minimum system that will happily run this?

I was thinking something along the lines of:

Phenom X3 8450
4gb Corsair Twin2X PC6400
Asus M2N68-AM (utilising the onboard Gfx)
Seagate 500Gb SATA II

I can build the above system locally for the equivilent of around £200. Would this suffice? Or does anyone have any suggestions as to a more suitable and/or better value system?

Thanks :)
 
I reckon that would be fine. If you give each VM 512K RAM, which should suffice you will still have enough left for the OS to function.

I am lucky enough to have a Mac Book Pro dual boot for Work, with 4GB of RAM and that happily runs 4 VMs in Fusion on OSX, I can only run 3 VM machines comfortably in Windows XP on the same hardware.. so maybe you should get a mac :D
 
That sounds quite good, although if your virtualisation software allows you to give each vm it's own core, you might be better off with a quad (one for each VM and the OS).

If you're just playing around to get used to the thing 4gb will do nicely; obviously if you want to start running apps on one or more of the VMs than you may want to add another couple of GB.

As for the mac comment - surely he could just double up on the ram to 8GB for another £40, giving an approximate saving of £1,000 on buying a mac ;-)
 
Audigex said:
As for the mac comment - surely he could just double up on the ram to 8GB for another £40, giving an approximate saving of £1,000 on buying a mac ;-)
Click to expand...

Good point... and yes a Mac would be a complete waste of cash... but what value can you put on the cool factor eh :D
 
lol yeah Macphobes are are strange breed ;)

I never used Mac OS until i got my laptop and I have to say I love it, just opens your mind to different ways of doing things. That does not however mean its always better than Windows though
 
I am looking at VMWare Workstation at the moment.

I would say important factors are lots of RAM, fast hard drives, and large hard drives, because VMs take up a lot of space.

You should be fine with 4GB of RAM, apparently some people manage to run VMware on an Acer Aspire One with an Intel Atom Processor and 1GB of RAM.

Rgds
 
Thanks for the comments guys, so the consensus seems to be that a setup such as I've listed will be fine for running 3 VMs. That's good to know :-)

Audigex said:
That sounds quite good, although if your virtualisation software allows you to give each vm it's own core, you might be better off with a quad (one for each VM and the OS).
Click to expand...

As far as I'm aware VMWare Workstation doesn't support that function so I'm not too bothered with going quad-core for the sake of it. ESXi may do, but I'm not installing that for just a couple test VMs. Do you know of another app that would allow core assignment?
 
There was one I saw, I tried to find it when I wrote that post but it's not in my bookmarks. I'll go through my StumbleUpon and check if I thumbs-up'd it :-)

At the same time, I think it may have been a project in development - I would probably have downloaded it at the time if it was complete.
 
Look at ESXi as it does not need a host OS and that will save you resources.

Add more ram - ram is key to VM performance (as is disk). I would suggest getting a couple of disks and having a couple of VMs on each disk.

Give 2k8 1.5G to 2G and the clients about 512k or 1 GB each - total for 2 server and 1 guest 4 GB which is a great value ram config.
 
As Hodders said, RAM is what you need in VM. That setup will them ok though, I've ran similiar in labs on less.

Might be worth thinking about another disk jsut to spread the load out.

By the way, 2k8 is fairly similiar to 2k3 in terms of interface.

If you are not too fussed about the host OS it might be worth looking in to Hyper-V from MS
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom