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What hardware would you recommend for running Linux VMs from Windows 8?

A

Arkitech

Diamond Member
I'm curious what kind of cpu and the amount of ram I should focus on for running Linux VMs from a Windows 8 build. I don't plan on running servers at the moment, but I might depending on what I'm playing with at the time.

Any one here with a gaming rig that you also use for VM stuff?
 
Worry about RAM more than CPU. Any modern i5/i7 CPU that you're likely to have in a gaming machine is not going to be your limiting factor before memory.

Quad core with 32 GB would be a good start. If you plan on going to 64 GB then maybe start thinking about 6/8 core CPU.

Viper GTS
 
paperwastage said:
most of the consumer flagship CPUs skip VT-D (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O), probably as a form of segmentation or non-stable during OC (you can get VT-D if you drop to non-K cpus or Xeons)

probably not going to be useful for a simple 1-2 VM operation

https://software.intel.com/en-us/bl...tel-virtualization-technology-for-directed-io
Click to expand...

According to this, non-K models support VT-d:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i5_microprocessors

Also, what will you be doing with the VMs? for just testing and development, 8 - 16 GB RAM is fine, 32 GB is overkill.
 
Non-K Intel CPUs support VT-d, but then you'll have to find a suitable mobo. Unless trying to do something like game with the VMs, by virtualizing the GPU hardware, it's going to be mostly useless.

VMs take CPU and RAM, just like the host. Want yGB for Windows 8, and to also run a VMs totaling xGB RAM? Buy at least (y+x)GB RAM. Want z spare CPU cores (note: 0 is a viable choice) while the VM is hogging t CPUs churning on something? Make sure your CPU has (z+t) threads. It's just that simple. You don't need a monster, unless you intend to give it monstrous workloads.

Anything from a Kaveri A8 to a LGA2011 Core i7 will do quite nicely.

Er, and don't even think about putting them on HDDs, today, if building new. With journaled or CoW FSes, it doesn't matter whether you choose fixed or dynamic sizing, your disk images will become heavily fragmented, and quickly. Slow SSDs still give you random read latencies nearly 100x better than HDDs.
 
Cerb said:
Non-K Intel CPUs support VT-d, but then you'll have to find a suitable mobo. Unless trying to do something like game with the VMs, by virtualizing the GPU hardware, it's going to be mostly useless.

VMs take CPU and RAM, just like the host. Want yGB for Windows 8, and to also run a VMs totaling xGB RAM? Buy at least (y+x)GB RAM. Want z spare CPU cores (note: 0 is a viable choice) while the VM is hogging t CPUs churning on something? Make sure your CPU has (z+t) threads. It's just that simple. You don't need a monster, unless you intend to give it monstrous workloads.

Anything from a Kaveri A8 to a LGA2011 Core i7 will do quite nicely.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

"Virtualization" in and of itself is too vague a term to really be helpful in guiding specification decisions. Any modern CPU can handle virtualization from a CPU feature point of view. What you need to figure out is what you are going to be doing with those virtual machines.

Hosting a single Linux VM in text mode for screwing with the the command line might require 256 MB of RAM and 1 core. Hosting a full Oracle RAC installation with a big database would require tens of gigabytes of RAM and a dozen cores.
 
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