iMac and virtualization

R

Randalthor

n00b
Joined
Mar 30, 2012
Messages
9
Greetings,

I plan to buy a 27" iMac when the new ones become available.

My job in IT currently requires a lot of lab work with virtual machines (5-8 running simultanously, so I was wondering if anyone here used their iMacs with many VMs on Parallels or Fusion.
Since the iMacs are no less powerful than any HP/Dell/homemade workstation I thought I could switch without this beeing a problem, but I wanted a power-user point of view.

Thanks :)
 
You'll be fine. Parallels is great. Put 16GB in there and you're good to go.
 
VMware Fusion does have unlimited VM machine support, but I've never personally utilized it. I have to imagine that only 4 physical cores (and 4 hyperthreaded cores on an i7) and only a maximum of 32GB ram is limiting however.
 
a maxed out I7 and 32GB of RAM should be plenty for 5-8 systems. I'd look into getting external drives though. What will kill you is random read/write as 5-8 systems all hammer a single drive at once.
 
Randalthor, A few SSD's might be more cost effective and practical. VM's run like butta on SSD's.

I use Parallels everyday at work and I consider it to be more feature rich and stable than vmware on a mac.
 
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