CPU for VMware Server

OoteR02

Senior member
Nov 6, 2002
367
0
71
I'm looking at building a box to host 5 or so vmware server instances of Win2k3. This is for a school system of about 550 users total. As we are a small system, cheaper is almost always better, but I'm not looking to sacrifice to much performance. These will be running on either a debian or centos 64bit (obviously) host.

I intend the vm's to be upgrades to the current win2k3 dc's which are old dell 2600's with 2.6 xeons and 140 gig raid 5's..

I had priced out a 2950 with dual quads and ~10 gigs of ram as well as about 1.8TB in storage (raid10 640's) The extra ram and hdd would come from newegg or zzf.

Now I notice the 2970 and a thread claims that AMD does have a slight performance edge on the VM side. The ram is also cheaper (ddr2 vs fbdimms)

What do you guys think? I've decided on the 29xx series, just need to decide on the platform.

Thanks!
 

classy

Lifer
Oct 12, 1999
15,219
1
81
AMD does perform better in VMWare. Whether you'll see a difference in actual use may or may not happen. I wouldn't use vmware server. Instead use VMware esxi. Its free, installs on bare metal, which would great on either of those servers, and it works terrific.
 

spittledip

Diamond Member
Apr 23, 2005
4,480
1
81
You could try Xenserver- much better use of resources, generally easier to use, cheaper also. We use both Vmware and Xen here where I work, and Xenserver is by far superior. At least in my experience.
 

mooseracing

Golden Member
Mar 9, 2006
1,711
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I've been happy with teh 3 VM's I'm using in Hyper V right now, were using a PE2950 Dual Xeon 3.16 Quads, 8GB RAM. I would like to get somethign in the 3 or 4u range to increase spindle capacity to handle more VM's though.
 

OoteR02

Senior member
Nov 6, 2002
367
0
71
ESXi eh? You guys have some background info on it?

My goal is to replicate several of the vm's nightly to a backup server, and a couple weekly.

These are going to be a Domain Controller, a small app server (access db stuff, blech) and an IIS server and a secondary domain controller..