Help for putting together a computer for VMWare

[AznMaverick]

I'm planning on buying a computer for VMWare and i foresee running about 3-4 virtual machines on this workstation. My question is would i be able to see a significant increase in performance if i get a Core 2 duo that supports virtualization or would the performance be not much greater than if i were to go with a Pentium D? The difference in price is very significant and if the performance is not that much greater, i might as well stay with a pentium d.

 

[xtknight]

Don't bother with VT support, it's fairly worthless at the moment.

But a dual-core could be crucial here if you're running that many VMs at once. In fact, I'd go for a Core 2 Extreme (quad-core) and dedicate a CPU to each VM. Most important things are: tons of RAM, low fragmentation on VMs, and a blazingly fast CPU. You are just begging for pain with a Pentium D. Core 2s are a completely different/revamped architecture, much better than the P-D. At the very least go for the Core 2 E6300.

P.S. What will the host OS be (and the guest OSes)?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Don't bother with VT support, it's fairly worthless at the moment.

But a dual-core could be crucial here if you're running that many VMs at once. In fact, I'd go for a Core 2 Extreme (quad-core) and dedicate a CPU to each VM. Most important things are: tons of RAM, low fragmentation on VMs, and a blazingly fast CPU. You are just begging for pain with a Pentium D. Core 2s are a completely different/revamped architecture, much better than the P-D. At the very least go for the Core 2 E6300.

P.S. What will the host OS be (and the guest OSes)?

That amount of CPU power is extremely expensive super overkill. Most VMs will spend their time idling and won't need a dedicated core.

I built an old Athlon XP 2500+ with 2GB computer to use as a VMware server and it ran six VMs all day long with no problems.

OP, if you are building a new computer from scratch considering the price of the lower-end Core 2 Duos I think it's a no brainer to pick one up. And the more ram, the better. Get at least 2GB as well as a sizeable hard drive.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

The number one thing you need is memory. And unless all your VMs are doing something important, you dont need heavy CPU support

I'm actually running a CentOS and Windows 2k virtualized on a bare minumum Debian system. Only PIII 550Mhz (though OC'd to 759) with 512MB of memory.

 

[xtknight]

Depends largely on the host OS/guest OS I suppose. With Linux as a host, I still get lots of slowdown on an E6300 running just one Vista VM. I couldn't even begin to imagine trying six of them. With only 2 GB of RAM here and the requirements to have XP run smooth at at least 512MB, with the host using typically a gig, you'd quickly get into paging territory after running two VMs. It depends on what you do with your VMs. Personally, I use them quite a bit, they are not running background tasks. General use with 4 VMs would be very frustrating here. My usage may be more like a VMware Server (i.e. assigning VMs to different people for constant use).

 

[aceO07]

I run my VM on a separate drive than my other stuff. Lots of RAM helps out too.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Im currently helping my bro with a VM on this PIII system. Ill let you know the memory footprint. Currently, my bare minum Debian, running VMWare server and a whole suite of webserver and webmin controls uses merely 94MB of ram. Im going to be stripping the webserver and webmin controls and putting them on VM. So Ill be able to let you know just how small a bare Debian + VMware Server can get

 

[AznMaverick]

i'm looking at linux as the host os and the guest OS' as win2k3, i want to study for my mcse and do labs and such, but don't have the money for more than one complete PC. thanks for all the info!

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Just finished the work. To have a base on which to virtualise OS's. I have a base Debian system running VMware Server. It takes up a simple 65MB of memory. Everything else is left to the Virtual OS's. So as I said, make sure you have a really good amount of memory and a CPU that supports VT and you'll be more than good to go.

 

[DaveSimmons]

For learning use of Windows2003 and exhange, SQL server, etc. you should be fine with 2 GB of RAM (cheap stuff is fine) and an E6300.

Give each VM a pre-allocated fixed-size virtual hard drive (instead of a HD file that starts out at 0K and grows as needed) for a significant boost in performance.

 

[aidanjm]

Originally posted by: AznMaverick
would i be able to see a significant increase in performance if i get a Core 2 duo that supports virtualization or would the performance be not much greater than if i were to go with a Pentium D?

is vmware able to use hardware virtualisation extensions? I know Xen is able to, however you still need to be choosy about which motherboard you get.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: aidanjm

Originally posted by: AznMaverick
would i be able to see a significant increase in performance if i get a Core 2 duo that supports virtualization or would the performance be not much greater than if i were to go with a Pentium D?

is vmware able to use hardware virtualisation extensions? I know Xen is able to, however you still need to be choosy about which motherboard you get.

As of now, no, VMware does not use Intel VT or Pacifica. VT has been shown to be slower than the typical hypervisor/kernel paravirtualization techniques in the majority of cases.

About the mobo, why? Doesn't every C2D-supporting mobo support VT? Or do you mean hardware drivers like network, etc? I had trouble getting Xen to run on my DS3 but a new kernel would solve that.

 

[AznMaverick]

If i'm also looking at an AMD system, what would you all recommend?