[TriLUG] Need opinions for specs of a VM box

[Brian McCullough]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 08:10:57AM -0400, Warren Myers wrote:
> Are you planning to run Xen, or VMware Server?
> 
> I'm familiar with the latter, so I'd suggest the following:
> For each VM, you'll need 20-40G hard drive space. For each one you want to
> run simultaneously, plan on 512-1024M RAM each.
> 
> For a linux host, you'll also want another 512-1024M RAM.
> 
> And you're going to want some beefy underlying CPU: minimum 2.0Ghz dual core
> if you're going to run more than one VM at a time.

I have found that Xen's requirements are somewhat less.  I have a
multi-server in an AMD-based box. Single X86_64 CPU, 3G RAM, 160 GB HD
using LVM, running 7 instances plus itself.  The largest single drive
allocation is for the mail server, at 20 G, the rest are in the 2-8 GB
range.  Load levels for the server are normally practically
non-existant, with the mail server recording respectable loads fairly
consistantly, and the database server coming in next.

I agree that throwing CPU and memory at such a system is a good idea,
you just don't need quite as much as his VMWare recommendations for Xen.


Brian