[TriLUG] Need opinions for specs of a VM box

[Ron Joffe]

On Thursday 26 July 2007 08:04, wayy2be wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   I am wanting to purchase a desktop for my home that will be able to
> handle running 4 or more VM's so that I can set up a network and do labs.
> Which route would be the best to go in terms of ram, hd space etc. I need
> help with the specs.  Thanks,
>
>   Rob
>

Rob, as others have mentioned, it really depends on which VM's you are 
running.

Here is our spec for our production VM Server:

8 GB Ram
2 Dual Core 3.0 Ghz Xeon Processors
4 300GB SCSI drives in a Raid 10

We run the following VM's on a regular basis:

  Oracle Database VM          - 3.6GB memory allocation
  SLED Desktop VM             - 1.0GB memory allocation
  SLES-9 File / Print VM      - 0.5GB memory allocation
  Debian TWiki VM             - 0.2GB memory allocation
  SLES-9 VPN VM               - 0.1GB memory Allocation
  SLES-9 CVS VM               - 0.5GB memory Allocation
  Win2K Accounting VM         - 0.2GB memory Allocation
  Kubuntu Test VM             - 0.5GB memory Allocation

And power on the a large number of other VM's (Win2K, WinXP, SLES-9, SLES-10, 
etc) as needed for testing.

Load average on this box hovers between 2 and 3. Performance is very 
acceptable for all of the required applications.

Hope this helps provide a real world example. If I have a fixed budget for a 
VM server, I would first make sure I have plenty of ram, and then spend my 
money on CPU, last would be disk space. 

Ron