question about hyper-v

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user3657

Limp Gawd
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Aug 23, 2007
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i have an old dual core D system i want to play around with. if i get hyper-v running, can I have more then 2 vm's? its not like for every vm, i need a core right?

4gigs of ram should be ok right? its for home use. basic file server and i host a few websites on 2003 right now. i want to get 2008 running and have my current 2003 as a vm, then i dunno.
 
You aren't limited to one VM per processor, but you will need to have hardware virtualization support for Hyper-V. Make sure your CPU and Motherboard support that before you even consider installing it.
 
To expand on Demon1000's post, your CPU must be VT capable. If you have windows running on the system right now, you can look at the CPU flags by using CPU-z.

cpuz.png


You need to have EMT64 in the "Instructions" line for your CPU to support Hyper-V (or ESXi 4.0 for that matter). If your CPU supports EMT64, your bios should have an option to enable hardware virtualization. Make sure this is also enabled.
 
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actually you need to have VT-* in your instruction set in CPU-z in order to support hyper-v
for the pentium-D cpu's this was unsupported until the 9x0 series.
 
user3657 said:
its not like for every vm, i need a core right?.
Click to expand...
NO. You can choose to give each machine 1 or both cores.

user3657 said:
4gigs of ram should be ok right? its for home use. basic file server and i host a few websites on 2003 right now. i want to get 2008 running and have my current 2003 as a vm, then i dunno.
Click to expand...

For home personal use, yes. You should be fine. Unless you're running something demanding like a SQL or Exchange server which will eat up all your RAM you can set that Server 2003 VM to use anywhere from half a gig to a gig of ram and it should do what you want.
 
SpoonMaN-EQ said:
actually you need to have VT-* in your instruction set in CPU-z in order to support hyper-v
for the pentium-D cpu's this was unsupported until the 9x0 series.
Click to expand...

Yes, sorry my bad. Updated screen shot:

cpuz.png


I've been working on verifying our systems for Win7 x64, hence my one track train of thought :p
 
turns out i have an old p4 ht cpu, the sticker looks like a dual core sticker.

so ill need a cpu but i still have a good 775 mb. are i3's that much faster then a dual core 3ghz say? they are right around the same price, but i would need a new mb for the i3. or i can get an old quad core for about 60more..........any ideas?
 
The i3's are pretty darn fast, especially for the price. Even the i5 is reasonably priced. Check the for sale/trade forums here and you'll surely find a pretty hot deal on one.

You'd have to find some review site to see the specifics, but I've heard it mentioned that one of the i3 chips gave a quad core (c2d line) a run for it's money, and I believe the i3 was faster when it was overclocked (which is extremely easy to do with these chips).
 
user3657 said:
turns out i have an old p4 ht cpu, the sticker looks like a dual core sticker.

so ill need a cpu but i still have a good 775 mb. are i3's that much faster then a dual core 3ghz say? they are right around the same price, but i would need a new mb for the i3. or i can get an old quad core for about 60more..........any ideas?
Click to expand...

Whats the brand and model of this motherboard? It may not even support a cpu that can do virtualization.

On the other hand. I had one of those 3ghz P4's that I ran server 2008 with, but I was using VMware, and it handled it pretty well.
 
i forget the specs, but its an asus high end 775 board. had it in the basment for a year. my board died, got a new one so i can still be up and running and rma'ed the bad one. was going to sell it but never got around to it lol.

think a dual core 9x chip can handle 3/4 vms?
 
it is a p5k deluxe which is a p35 chipset. does this support vt? if not, is it needed or it will just be slower? i just relized if i get an i3, i would have to get ddr3. i have 4gigs of ddr2 around also.
 
hrm, i just got done reading http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1376255 and even though they talk about esx, the specs are no where near mine.

is a decent dual core and 4gigs of ram fast enough? my 2003 box right now hosts a few web forms, and does exchange for my pop email. i want to turn this into 2 seprate vms and maybe one or two for messing around.

is this going to be fast enough for my websites?
 
I think running VM's is more about the amount of memory you have than the processor, especially if you dont over spec your VM's. Give them only what they need. I run several VM's on my "server" and its pretty modest hardware. A quad core AMD, and 8gigs of DDR2. I have an SQL, Exchange, CSS, UT3, COD4 servers, and pfsense all running in their own VM's. They only have the amount of resources they need. And so far no VM has gotten bogged down, and the host sever never gets overwhelmed either.


If you're using Server 2003 in the VM's I'd start both with both cores, and 768MB of RAM. The web server can probably fucntion with less RAM. Maybe 512mb, but make that decision afterwards. Exchange can be a greedy mofo when it comes to ram.

I've kept a close monitor on all my servers and will actually be LOWERING the ram used in each one. For instance I have the CSS server using 512mb of ram but it never uses more than 325mb even with 6 bots running around killing each other all the time, even when nobodys connected. I was going to set it down to 400mb and see how it runs.
 
If your Exchange server is light usage (6-10) users, running Exchange 2003 on server 2003, mine ran fine with 650 MB of RAM. It was also a fairly light use web and FTP server.

Exchange 2010 on a 2k8 R2 box, anything less than 1000 MB and it ran like a dog.

I've always adjusted my memory loads by looking at the server after its been up and running a couple of days, and adjusting the memory down until it was keeping about 60 MB free under normal use. Sometimes cutting it down that far leads to really slow patching, especially with something like .Net service packs, but other than that operations should be fine.

Memory is much more important for long term operation than CPU, unless you are running compuationally intensive apps. The only case you'll notice lower performance from a slower CPU on VMs for typical home/dev use is boot times. Even then, how much disk throughput is beng shared among VMs is usually still more of an issue.
 
hrm, so maybe ill just stick with what i have and go with a dual or quad core 775 chip. try it out with 4gigs of ram, and get more if needed. my biggest concern is my forums. they can on avg see 5 users at a time. then i have some sql/php gallerys, the actual html websites, etc. and if i get linked from another site i can see traffic hit the cpu up to 100% at times. its a p4 3.4ghz right now.

exchange is just me, but i would like to upgrade to 2010 and make that its on vm.

i have thought about the disk stuff. i was going to make one array, but i have decided to make one array for the os and vms/ and another array for storage.
 
Demon10000 said:
The i3's are pretty darn fast, especially for the price. Even the i5 is reasonably priced. Check the for sale/trade forums here and you'll surely find a pretty hot deal on one.

You'd have to find some review site to see the specifics, but I've heard it mentioned that one of the i3 chips gave a quad core (c2d line) a run for it's money, and I believe the i3 was faster when it was overclocked (which is extremely easy to do with these chips).
Click to expand...

The power consumption on i3's and i5's is great also. Speed wise, you usually see C2Q's beat the i3 and i5's in things that really like physical cores. On the other hand they are comperable in some ways like handbrake video encoding. See core i3-530 and i5-650 v. Q6600

I also totally agree on memory. The minimum I am using on any system that runs a hypervisor is 8GB right now.
 
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