• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

VMWare Workstation

X

xrtmk

n00b
Joined
Jul 29, 2011
Messages
15
Hello guys,

I need some help, I need to run 8-10 VM's at same time on all of them there will be opened 2-3 tabs on Google chrome (gmail and forums) and an application for traffic monitoring and that's it.

I don't want to buy server I just want to upgrade my PC if it is possible to run so many VM's.

My current hardware spec:

CPU: Phenom X4
RAM: 8GB Kingston
HDD: 1x WD green 500gb, 1x WD Blue EZEX

Please give me advice what to upgrade, I know I need SSD and more RAM, but how much :)

Thanks
 
If it is light Linux in VMs, you are probably already good to go. If Win, another 8 GB RAM could be useful. If you start/stop them often, an SSD would be a great addition, otherwise not needed.
 
You'll want at least 16 GB of RAM, disk I/O is going to be a killer if the VMs are doing anything disk related. I'd get two SSD's and split them VMs among them.
 
Okay, a Phenom X4. So, a quad-core processor with no hyperthreading.

Running more than 2x per core?

On Workstation?

Fuhgeddabout it.

Also, simply dropping to an SSD isn't going to help a lot as that many will cause massive I/O contention even on an SSD.

You're going to want multiple drives, or a decent array, to spread the I/O load.

As much as you'd love to tweak your current box, it's not going to be running 10x VMs on top of a host OS at anything remotely resembling even barely acceptable performance.

Sorry. Workstation's not the proper setup for that sort of thing.
 
If I can run >600 tabs on an A10, I think his X4 will survive with 30 tabs across 10 VMs and I don't see anything I/O heavy in his workload, let alone for multiple SSDs.
 
It will be Windows XP on all of them, so you +8gb of RAM and SSD would help me or not? :)
 
Those are the easiest upgrades to do at any time, so just try to run it as is first and see how you do. It would help for sure, but maybe you could manage without them. If you plan to do other things on the computer while VMs are running, I would definitely upgrade.
 
Meeho said:
Those are the easiest upgrades to do at any time, so just try to run it as is first and see how you do. It would help for sure, but maybe you could manage without them. If you plan to do other things on the computer while VMs are running, I would definitely upgrade.
Click to expand...

Tried with 4 VM's and they are very slow ... lagging, 1 core and 1gb of ram for each VM, the host is ok, may be I will try to split them 2 vm's on the first and 2 vm's on the second HDD.
 
In my experience with workstation when I had more than 3 VMs running on a single mechanical drive it was painful. I've since moved to using an SSD and the performance is much better. For larger testing I use a standard desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, ASUS Z68 MB) running ESXi 5.5 and all the VMs are running on SSDs.
 
I disagree with some comments on the I/O load part. Depending on the work load each VM, and the host, will see you may be able to get by with what you have after making some changes. To re-iterate I said "may be able to get by".

At 10 VMs with 1GB RAM each and 1 vCPU, you may be taxing the processor and you definitely need more RAM. I would add 8GB RAM and at least one SSD. One SSD could handle that many VMs, but once again is depends on load/usage. I personally would add 2-3 smaller SSDs since they are typically cheaper, you end up with more overall space and you can spread the load of the VMs if you need to. Just run them as standard drives. There is no need to RAID them. With that many VMs I think you might be able to get by with the WD Blue BUT you will need to stagger the VM startup and shutdown. If you pause then resume your VMs at all you will want an SSD. Once all VMs are up the sustained IOPs may be tolerable, but I would be concerned with the "peaks" in workload and the number of them. I would also upgrade you host OS as XP is dead and IMO Windows 7/8 has better memory management.
 
xrtmk said:
Tried with 4 VM's and they are very slow ... lagging, 1 core and 1gb of ram for each VM, the host is ok, may be I will try to split them 2 vm's on the first and 2 vm's on the second HDD.
Click to expand...

What exactly is lagging? How read/write intensive is the traffic monitoring?
 
peanuthead said:
I disagree with some comments on the I/O load part. Depending on the work load each VM, and the host, will see you may be able to get by with what you have after making some changes. To re-iterate I said "may be able to get by".

At 10 VMs with 1GB RAM each and 1 vCPU, you may be taxing the processor and you definitely need more RAM. I would add 8GB RAM and at least one SSD. One SSD could handle that many VMs, but once again is depends on load/usage. I personally would add 2-3 smaller SSDs since they are typically cheaper, you end up with more overall space and you can spread the load of the VMs if you need to. Just run them as standard drives. There is no need to RAID them. With that many VMs I think you might be able to get by with the WD Blue BUT you will need to stagger the VM startup and shutdown. If you pause then resume your VMs at all you will want an SSD. Once all VMs are up the sustained IOPs may be tolerable, but I would be concerned with the "peaks" in workload and the number of them. I would also upgrade you host OS as XP is dead and IMO Windows 7/8 has better memory management.
Click to expand...
My host is Windows 7, VM's are XP :)
thanks for the advice, definitely I'll add 8gb of ram and SSD.
 
Looks like your HDD is choking. Did you give enough total RAM to VMware and disabled memory swapping? How about after VMs are up and running their intended tasks?

In any case, +8 GB and SSD will help.
 
I would separate you OS from the VMs. As Meeho suggested, you can change around the memory swapping in VMware Workstation too.
 
xrtmk said:
The actions, when I double click on Chrome icon I wait longer 30-40 seconds for the reaction :)
Click to expand...

Is your host swapping?

If you've allocated more memory to the VMs than your host has it's probably swapping badly. If you've got 10 VMs with 1Gb each you're definitely going to want 16Gb in the host.
 
xrtmk said:
The actions, when I double click on Chrome icon I wait longer 30-40 seconds for the reaction :)
Click to expand...

assign more cpu cores to each vm, you don't need 1 cpu core per vm, you can assign all of your available cores to each vm and the host will take care of priority.
 
Meeho said:
Looks like your HDD is choking. Did you give enough total RAM to VMware and disabled memory swapping? How about after VMs are up and running their intended tasks?

In any case, +8 GB and SSD will help.
Click to expand...

1gb RAM for each VM, where to dissable memory swapping, my host is ok I don't have any problems with it while VM's are running.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top