Over Allocating Resources in ESXi

[Jesse B]

I'm currently in the process of building myself a dedicated ESXi box. Basically I just need to wait and see how things go financially (school sucks ), and then buy the motherboard and memory; good to go otherwise. I'm also waiting on Chilly for the Intel drivers, so things kind of work out

Anyways, I've been kind of planning out what I'd like to run on this machine, and what kind of resources they require. Basically I'll be running a plain white-box with an i5-2500 (supports VT-d, so does the Q67 board I'm getting) and 16GB of RAM, and then some add-in cards.

Basically there's 3 VM's that I "need":
- File Server (OpenIndiana)
- Media Server (Some Linux distro)
- Web Server (Debian)

Between those three, I've allocated 6.5GB of RAM. With all the other VM's I'd like to run, I get up to about 18.5GB of RAM. I feel like this shouldn't be an issue with 16GB, but I'm just confirming.

The one thing I'm really unsure about is how I go about allocating cores. Ideally I'd like for most of the VM's (except a few) to have 2 cores, but doing this puts me up to 13 cores, which is obviously way over 4 Is this possible to do, or...?

I'll also be passing through a few PCI-e devices, but that's not really a huge issue.

Thanks,


- Jesse

 

[danswartz]

Unless the guests burn enough cycles, stick with one core each until and unless you find a problem? Also, if you have VM tools installed on the guests, memory over-commit is not such a big deal (as long as you don't go too far overboard...)

 

[NetJunkie]

Give a VM a single vCPU until it needs more and shows high CPU utilization in the guest.

 

[Jesse B]

Alright, thanks. Just wasn't sure how it all worked in ESXi.