Cheap laptop for VM's - SB Celeron or go up to i3?

zero2dash

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 23, 2007
Messages
6,098
Our school workstations suck.
We've been running 2 VM's at once on these things and they're horrible.
E6800 running XP32 with 4GB of RAM. VM's on a USB2 2.5" HD.
We can only allocate 1GB of RAM to each VM otherwise the host computer chokes. (VM's of 7 Pro 32bit and Server 2008 Standard)

I'm thinking of getting a laptop to bring to school to use to host the VM's. Either way I'm planning on upgrading to 8GB of RAM to allocate at least 2-3GB of RAM to each VM.

I'm trying to spend as little as possible here....sub-$300 would be ideal.
Microcenter has an Acer laptop with a B815 Celeron (which is a SB) for $279.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0382600
This is the cheapest laptop I see on their site that supports VT-x.

However ~
I'm wondering if even with the RAM, the CPU would then be the bottleneck here. Obviously it's a lower end....1.6GHz, only a dual core.
So I'm wondering....for VM purposes, should I go ahead and just move up to an i3?
Acer with an i3-2350M for $399. http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0382829

Again no matter which I get, I'm upgrading to 2x4GB of 1333.
For VM purposes though, would the CPU be a bottleneck?
I suppose my knee jerk reaction would be YES; with the i3 I could allow each VM to use 2 threads instead of 1. I just wonder where the biggest bottleneck would be....probably HD first (being that we have to use a portable drive)....if I get a laptop though I could store everything on it's drive instead.

Just looking to see what everyone thinks (or if anyone's bought a laptop specifically for hosting VM's). TIA :)
 
depends more on what your doing in the VM's .....

i'm guessing the i3 is going to be worth that little bit extra just so you have a bit more future proof(doesnt sound like an upgrade will happen anytime soon)
 
I run several VMs without issue on a machine with similar specs to that one, OP. I think the fact that your VMs live on a USB drive is a much larger factor in the poor performance you are experiencing than any of the system hardware. Relocate to an internal or eSATA drive and you should see a marked performance increase.
 
Thanks for the input...
Basically the only way to upgrade (my experience at least :)) is to get my own laptop. These towers are older Dells with no eSATA and no USB3 or Firewire either. They are locked down (due to being campus machines). There's not enough space on the workstation's internal HD to run the VMs off of, and the 5.25" hot swappable drive bay the machines have actually house the HD that the OS (XP32) is installed on.

I figure spending the extra $120 on the i3-2350 model would be worth it, but wanted to know for sure. My plan would be to get the laptop, up the ram to 8GB, copy the VMs to the laptop HD and run them off there while in the lab. (Quite a few people run their own laptops in lab.) I would give 2-3GB of ram to each VM, set each to use 2 threads, and run both off the internal laptop HD. If I needed to store stuff on the external, I could copy to it afterwards.
 
Back
Top