Workstation for Virtual Machines

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  supnigs super skids on 02/01/2017 - 15:51

  Use lots of ram and a nas

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    ajs900 on 02/01/2017 - 16:03

    Thanks for the reply supnigs - do you have any recommendations on a NAS for this?

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      supnigs super skids on 02/01/2017 - 16:04

      Any nas. Depends what you wanna do with the vms. I use freenas

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    Danthemanz on 02/01/2017 - 16:20

    +2

    Why a NAS for a couple of VMs on a single host? Just going to slow things down.
    Personally I would recommend a big SSD/s for OSs and 7200 rpm disk/s for data, assuming the below.
    I'm assuming we are talking some sort of home, lab or testing environment? No one is going to recommend this to run a business off.

    Most important part of say ESXi support will be the correctly supported network cards, chipset and disk controller.
    Looking up the particular chips within the Motherboards on online forums discussing vmware hardware support.

    If you are looking for better supported Motherboards, look at Supermicro.
    They have a huge range of boards, some priced ok for what they are, not cheap but cheaper than buying a real HP/Dell server.

    • 

      ajs900 on 02/01/2017 - 16:30

      Thanks Danthemanz, definitely talking about just a homelab here.
      Thanks for the advice abut supermicro - didn't know about this!

    • 

      Diji1 on 02/01/2017 - 17:56

      He isn't planning on using ESXi

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  [Deactivated] on 02/01/2017 - 17:02

  I run all my VM's on a E560 Lenovo

  i7 6500u
  32gb DDR3 Ram
  512gb SSD

  Can easy run 3-4 Virtual machines without fuss, of course depending on what you want to do with them

  you are better off buying a server second hand to do the job and putting esxi on there, do your research on the best unit for the money

  • 

    ajs900 on 02/01/2017 - 17:05

    Thanks shawncro 222

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  [Deactivated] on 02/01/2017 - 18:23

  What are you doing with the VMs?
  Maybe better using a cloud service like Amazon or Azure.

  • 

    ajs900 on 02/01/2017 - 20:14

    Thanks Drew22. Just running server 2012/R2 maybe 2016 soon with some windows 10 VM's (maybe total 5 VM's) I signed up for Microsoft Azure but it's still a bit buggy IMO.

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      [Deactivated] on 02/01/2017 - 20:43

      Yeah but what are you running on those VMs?
      What are you trying to achieve?

      How is Azure "a bit buggy" in your experience?

      • 

        ajs900 on 02/01/2017 - 21:08

        They will just be running the windows 10 base operating system nothing more complex than that. The short term goal is for the environment to be used for testing windows deployment images (MDT/WDS/SCCM). I should clarify, azure is fine it's the management portal for azure which is slow, clunky and unresponsive imo.

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        [Deactivated] on 02/01/2017 - 23:56

        @ajs900:
        So is this to learn something?
        Did you try the new portal?

        If you're looking to learn, PowerShell is probably one of the most important skills you can have.

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  tonyjzx on 03/01/2017 - 00:23

  Here's my VM machine:

  Xeon e2670 8 cores, 8 threads on and old MSI x79 board
  32Gb ram (would like more but board only has 4 slots and 4 x 8Gb ram is costly enough)
  I use an SSD per VM but since my VMs are small I dont need more than 120-240Gb (with ssds so cheap its not a big deal)

  the above unit runs min. 4 VMs each usually dual core w/ HT and up to 8Gb each

  would run double that fine

  you need cores and mem and you ideally want to run a max of maybe 2 VMs per sata channel assuming you're not running huge bandwidth per VM

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  tonyjzx on 03/01/2017 - 02:34

  also FYI

  AMD Zen 8 cores would probably represent an incredible bargain for VM users. Just saying, would not invest in INtel right now.