Hardware specs for vmware of MS Virtual PC?

RangeR

HI,

I know the quoted minimum system specs for both of these products but I'm looking for some realistic advice on what sort of hardware I'll need to run a nice system with maybe 3 to 6 virtual machines on this baby.

I was thinking maybe a dual xeon with about 4GB Ram and somewhere between 500GB to 1TB.

Some of the virtual machines will be development sandboxes to test stuff but one or two might find themselves into live production servers.


Suggestions / recommendation?

Sponge Bob

exactly, you could go even higher on the ram and load one or two of the vmplayer files .vmwx is it , into a Ramdisk for even more speed , especially if data is written to a database elsewhere . Rebooting that should be quick ???

Disk space is not as much an issue as ram, for server virtual player files assume you need a gb of ram for each running virtual machine min , also get more than one gb network card as they can get bottlenecked serving all the bridged Ip addresses

another advantage of ramdisks is that the files do not become overly fragmented in a production environment and can be defragged quickly .

RangeR

Sweet. Cheers SB. Good to know I'm on the right track.

Static M.e.

Yeah VM's are all about the Ram, as for the HD I dont think you would need a TB, of course that would depend on what you plan to use it for.

You can set the Vms only to take up space as needed, so lets say for Win 2003 DC set up with 10 Gb for the OS and 60 Gb for storage you create the image but inactual fact it might only take up 8Gbs of actual disk space on the Host machine.

So 6 images might only take up 48 Gbs of actual space rather than the
6 x 70 Gbs if you get me?

Now you can set the VM's to take the actual disk space at the start but never bother.

Also my personal opinion is to use Vmware I found the MS version to be very beta'ish, Vmware is so much smoother. Also check out the Vm importer tool for going from physical to virtual. (Taking an image of your existing server and creating a virtual image of it)

RangeR

Static M.e. wrote:

Also check out the Vm importer tool for going from physical to virtual. (Taking an image of your existing server and creating a virtual image of it)

Wow. That's impressive. Is that in the free version or the paid for version?

Sponge Bob

I'll email you a nice 4gb RH5 if you want , almost totally yum'ed

Static M.e.

Its the Free version.

You can also use Symantec Live state to create backups of your existing servers on the fly and then import them to into Vmware (Although this is probably the ONLY good use for that product)

Ive heard rumours that you can also import from Acronis image although I havent tried this yet. Acronis is the new ghost.

WizZard

Are you using MS Virtual Server or VMware ESX (or Infrastructure as it's now called)?

RangeR

WizZard wrote:

Are you using MS Virtual Server or VMware ESX (or Infrastructure as it's now called)?

If that's directed at me, then I don't have an answer. I'm still evaluatnig both products. But I'll probably go with vmWare as I'm probably going to put a linux distro as the host OS. We don't have an abundance of Winsows Server licenses.

Static M.e.

Just to point out Vmware ESX is the paid version of Vmware and doesn't run on a host OS. From what I remember (its been 3 years since I used the ESX version) ESX is run by a command line which uses very similar commands to linix/unix

VMware Server is the free version which still works great. (Which I now currently use)

Stephen

VMWare ESX runs on VMWare's own version of Linux (well kind of, but we'd really be getting into semantics here), called VMnix, which is loosely based on Red Hat. It runs a terminal only - everything is managed and configured through a web interface.

SwampThing

My 2c.
We use VMWare in work - 2 4-way IBM X445's, 12GB RAM each and about 3TB fibre-attached 15K SCSI. With this kind of hardware you'd be looking at ESX.

VMWare Server, formerly GSX, which is now free I believe, would be sound for what you're looking at. You can get both a Windows or Linux server version - either will accomodate whatever virtual OS's you choose. I'd recommend the Linux server and I'm basing that purely on the stability of the ESX product. I'm making the assumption that a lot of the core ESX code has gone into the linux Server product. I'm probably telling you what you already know.

It's the way to go - I'd have no hesitation in recommending it.

The physical to virtual software is called P2V from IBM. I don't think it's freeware. It's a hell of a good piece of software when you already have a physical server configured just the way you want it. It can be a bit tricky to use with older servers - we ended up Ghosting/Acronis-ing a few physical servers.

Anyway, I'll shutup now and leave you to it.

edit:

Just something I thought I'd add. On the memory - I'm sure Static can confirm this better for you. anyway, ESX features a 'ballon' memory area where common componentes to all the host OS's is loaded once and shared among them all - like say certain DLL's etc. The point is, when you're calculating your memory requirements, you can go a little less than the sum of the physical machines you intend to virtualise. Maybe the Server version of VMWare requires a bit for the Server OS; I'm not sure.