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Recycling hardware for a VM server

L

LAiN_OfTheWired

Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2008
Messages
825
Hi guys,

I just upgraded from a Phenom II X3 720/ASUS M4A79T Deluxe to a Core i7 2600K/ASUS Sabertooth P67. I'm planning on recycling the old CPU+motherboard to create a box where I can host a few VMs to continue my learning. Here's what I'm planning on:

1 Server 2008 R2 VM
1 Linux Server VM (not sure which distro I'm going with yet, likely compiling from scratch using Gentoo though)
2 Linux desktop VMs (likely one FedoraSec and one openSuse)
1 Windows desktop VM (WinXP)
1 Vyatta firewall/router VM
GNS3 environment with possibly up to 6 virtual devices at once

I have a couple of questions. Is the X3 720 going to be fast enough to be running 3-4 VMs at its stock speed? Right now it is overclocked to 3.34GhZ but it will no longer be in a high airflow case. How much RAM will I be needing, 4 or 8GB? I will need to do some graphics-intensive stuff (not too much though) so whats a good GPU to use for VMs?

VirtualBox is what I will probably end up using since its free and has a decent amount of features. If you can suggest me a better free or cheap VM software solution I'm all ears.
 
Id say 8gb memory, vm's dont really have a gpu...its a virtual gpu, so using the vm for graphics intensive stuff isnt going to be ideal
 
The more memory the better. From my experience, VM's use more RAM and CPU cycles. As dbwillis said, VM's can't access your physical GPU, and just have virtual GPU's. Running any graphic-intensive application should be done on the host itself.
 
So tell me this, when in Virtual Box you have a setting for video memory. Does it come from the GPU or also from the system RAM? I don't plan on doing gaming or anything, but I did plan on doing some graphics work for a UI on the Linux server (it'll be a standard LAMP when I'm done).
 
I'm fairly certain it comes from your system memory, aka RAM, but I could be wrong. As far as I know, there is no way to utilize your graphics card when it comes to virtualization at this point in time.
 
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