Building a VMWare server...any recommendations?

[syee]

Looking to see if anyone has experience with the hardware end of VMWare.

I'm trying to piece together some hardware for a lab system I want to run at home. I'm looking to have 3-4 Windows 2003 virtual servers running to test our software in a test environment. It's not a production environment, so it doesn't have to be super-duper powered or robust, but I'm not really sure where to start to get the most bang for my buck.

I want to keep the budget relatively low since it's coming out of my own pocket for the time being. I have a few questions though:
*Is a quad core any more beneficial than a dual or a single core? I'd guess VMWare would be multithreaded but can it take advantage of a quad core or is it optomized for a dual or even single cores? Would a Phenom (or PhenomII) or an Intel dual or quad be more optomized for this task?
*Memory - the more the better of course. Host operating system will probably be Windows Server 2003. If I'm remembering correctly, it doesn't have the 32bit limitiation in that I can install more than 4GB, is that right? (I'm thinking of maxing it out at 8GB)
*Mobo - was thinking about a decent cheaper run of the mill board. Not sure which one but anything around $100-$150 would suffice?
*Video shouldn't matter I would think? On board or a cheaper video card should work?

What do you guys think? I think the biggest question mark for me is the CPU - since quad cores have dropped to an affordable level, I want to utilize it if it helps. If it makes no difference, I could spend the extra price difference elsewhere.

 

[bsobel]

I short more cores the better, the more memory the better....

 

[dbcooper1]

With all those cores and RAM, you could be I/O bound unless you have multiple physical drives and network connections.

 

[syee]

That would be my logic. I just couldn't find anything on VMWare's site stating anything about quad cores or any comparisons, hence the question. Almost all the documentation I could find was talking about dual core.

Another interesting comparison - a higher clocked dual core, or a low to mid range quad core (at the same price point)? Which would be more beneficial?

I'm going to load this thing up with the maximum I can shove in there. Probably at least 8GB for now.

Again, it's a lab box, so it's not going to be stressed too much. Hence I'm hoping the I/O isn't going to be too much of an issue. I'll probably pick up a decent 1TB drive and throw that in there. It should be enough space for the time being.

 

[dbcooper1]

I have more experience with VirtualBox but most of the same rules would likely apply. It would also depend on what kind of server is it- file/media, web, database/SQL. I'd go with a higher clocked dual rather than a quad but I suspect that might be the least important variable, and lots of RAM and a couple 500GB instead of the TB and a couple Gb network cards.

 

[syee]

Sorry - I should clarify our software usage.

It would consist of one DB server (using SQL 2005), a web server based on IIS that serves up a web interface for our applications, and a "storage center" that essentially holds the audio files recorded by our system). I may add in another one later on that runs SQL Server Analysis services and a server that does audio analysis/transcription which would be more CPU intensive.

Thanks guys for your suggestions!

 

[dbcooper1]

How many simultaneous connections do you expect? If fewer than 10 or so, it probably doesn't matter much at all.

 

[syee]

It will definitely be less than 10. It will just be myself doing the testing, with probably no more than 5 virtual machines at any one time.

 

[dbcooper1]

I'd go low cost then, even use something you already have if that's a possibility. You could double the cost and see less than a 10% increase in performance otherwise. I have mine running on an e2180 with 4GB and a 500GB drive and single Gb NIC and it works fine. The most important item might be the Gb network card unless you have a couple databases dueling for the same disk at the same time. I'm also running WHS on an Atom 330 base board with Gb NIC and a couple TB drives and it works fine even doing it's redundancy thing in the background.

 

[Thor86]

Any modern desktop hardware will run those number of simultaneous VMs just fine.

As a previous poster stated, your biggest bottleneck would be I/O when all those simultaneous VMs contend for disk usage. If possible, try and run at least ICH8R in RAID 1+0 with 4 physcal disks.

 

[syee]

Most of the hardware I currently have is pretty old (as in 3+ years old)

Hardware I do have:
Personal PC
AMD Opteron 170
2GB RAM
750GB+1TB 7200RPM SATA drives
6800GT video

Work PC:
HP d330 micro tower
P4 2.4GHz CPU
1.5GB RAM
320GB 7200RPM SATA drive
On board video

Current test PC
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
1GB RAM
120GB 7200RPM IDE drive
Some super old PCI video card

I'm not sure if the old test PC is up to the task for this though. It's pretty outdated and slow, and sourcing more parts for it isn't going to be easy. Also, I'm pretty limited on the amount of RAM I can stick in it as well as finding larger IDE HD's.

I'm either going to have to get an upgrade to my personal PC and use my personal PC as the lab, or put together a budget PC with some up to date parts. If I'm to upgrade my personal PC, now wasn't the time I wanted to do it, as I was looking for when the i7's came down in price for my next major upgrade.

 

[JackMDS]

You should also look in to this, http://www.microsoft.com/downl...699C3A0&displaylang=en

It is free and might be better suited for Win2003.

It is basically Windows 2008 x64 trimmed down to just be standalone Virtual computer, you do not install it on top of other OS, it is the OS and the Virtual part together as one cohesive machine.

There is also, Windows 2003 VHD trials for it, http://www.microsoft.com/downl...0e415b6&displaylang=en

As well as Windows 2008 and other interesting stuff, http://www.microsoft.com/downl...c5af0c9&displaylang=en

An hardware solution can be to move the Video and hard drives to the XP 2600+, and make it you main computer. Then use the Opteron with the 2GB RAM and one of the smaller drives as the Virtual server.

When Virtual computer are running ion production environment with real data loaded server like SQL and Exchange they do need a lot of power, but for experimentation it is Not so important.

 

[Winterpool]

I built a cheap AMD server last summer to run VMs (Hyper-V, haven't tried VMware yet). I needed more memory almost straight away and am now up to 6 GB, thinking about 8 (thankfully DDR2 is outrageously cheap). I went AMD because it's possible to get virtualisation extensions ('Pacifica' AMD-V tech) with cheaper (< $100) cpus -- I got an Athlon X2 4800+. These days you could probably find an Intel chip supporting 'Vanderpool' for < $100 though (make sure you look up the chip's official specs to confirm VT support).

As others have suggested, disk I/O may prove a bottleneck. I've got three physical hard drives and usually two or three VMs running, and I very often run into situations where the machine is seeking away on the disks, taking seconds rather than microseconds. The two primary VMs are running Windows Server 2003 x64 (SharePoint, SQL) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (Movable Type, Apache, MySQL). SharePoint access usually results in the most painful disk activity, for whatever reason. It's a good idea to sit down and sketch likely disk I/O across physical and virtual disks.

Edited: the Newegg and Wikipedia pages suggest 'Denmark' Opterons do not have AMD-V technology. I believe VMware ESX is less strict about this requirement than Hyper-V, though Jack would probably know better than I.