Specs/Performance

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Hi Guys,

Been using VMware for a fair while now - however it can run 1 OS quite nicely, takes up a lot of resources, but its comftorable. Two OS's however, and ur killing the PC!

I want to play around with server 2003 - now i can just run this on its own! Let alone with any clients. I dont think my PC spec is hugly old, see what you think:

Athlon XP 2100 (runs @ 1.7ghz)
512 ram (nothing special make wise!)
Fair amount of HD space if this makes any difference!
550W PSU

Prob the most important bits.

Now i want to get a new PC - but i want to ask you guys if its actually possible, with a decent PC spec, to have server 2003 in VMware + a client running at the same time, and not have it painfully slow?

 

Thanks for the info Ken!

Pretty sure my HD are 7200rpm - But for the upgrade i may try and get some faster ones and dedicate them to VPC's

Im hoping to get similar specs to your PC so thats excellent news that it runs ok! Its a big pain trying to use the server+1 client at the moment, so should be able to learn a lot more with the faster PC.

Havent used MS virtual PC in a while - does this have the same flexibility that VMware has? creating an internal network of VPC's?

 

And remember with VMs the more *RAM* in the host PC the better things will run!! Go for at least 2 GB.

 

I would agree with Bluerinse. IMO, RAM is the most important factor with running VMs well. The CPU is only likely to take a serious hit if you have multiple machines booting simultaneoulsy, the same goes for the hard drives. I tend to assign the default amout of RAM to each machine. If you're not doing anything too heavy you can assign an XP clint 256 or even 128MB with no problems. I have 2GB of RAM and I've had eight VMs running and still haven't reached the limit. I don't know about VCP, but VMWare makes use of the virtual memory on the host machine so the total amount of RAM assigned to your VMs can exceed the total physical RAM in the host machine.

 

Cheers guys!

Ill make sure my ram is up to par whilst spec'ing my new PC

Ill aim for 2gb, probably an Athlon 64 X2, although not sure what the top of the market is at the moment, i.e. amd vs intel, processor wise

 

Just another little point. You might want to install a couple of smaller hard disks in the machine and then install different vm's onto them. If you look around you might find 1 or 2 20 GB disks. Then you can put a vm server on one, a client on the second and the hdd that your host is on you can leave alone. This will be a definate increase in performance too.

 

Thanks for the info nugget!

Currently spec'ing up my PC - might see if i can get one of the WD raptor drives with 10,000 RPM also for the server, might help things Plenty of ram of course. Now just need to decide the type of ram (CAS timings confuses me somewhat!) and whether or not to go AMD or Intel. From what i understand, AMD are good for 1 devoted heavy duty task - and Intel are good at multitasking