VMWare Workstation/Server Hardware
Matt Michaels
I'm just curious on what good hardware would be? Do you get multiple drives
for each guest OS, how much RAM to run maybe 4 guest OS's...
I'd like to be able to run the stuff smoothly if that is possible and
wondering what others use...
Thanks for your help!
Hans-Peter Diettrich
> I'm thinking of upgrading/building a machine to run VMWare Workstation
> on...
I assume that a server-type machine, with more than 4 GB of RAM, will be
a good choice. The more cores the better, but AFAIK such CPU's are
expensive. I configure my VMs for a single core each, and let the host
distribute the load on the physical cores.
> I'm just curious on what good hardware would be? Do you get multiple
> drives for each guest OS, how much RAM to run maybe 4 guest OS's...
Physical disks and their controllers are bottlenecks on every system.
When your machines require much disk space, then disk seeks are
inevitable. Nonetheless multiple drives can seek and transfer data in
parallel, so that multiple drives will increase the performance, even if
connected to only one or two controllers. In my next upgrade I'll
consider an external disk rack for hosting multiple drives, as available
e.g. for RAID systems, but use them as independent disks (RAID-1?).
Since almost every guest OS provides its own disk cache, the more RAM
you spend each VM, the better. But the time to suspend or restart such a
VM again depends on the amount of virtual RAM, which then must be saved
to and loaded from the physical disks. If in doubt, don't assign too
much RAM to your VMs, so that the host won't start swapping. When your
guests shall do real work, then install server-type guest systems as
well, which do not require much RAM for visual effects, i.e. no Vista,
no .NET, which waste machine ressources at their best.
DoDi