MCSE Lab With VmWare- How much Ram I need?

khantahmina

Hello Guys,I want to install vmware workstation on my laptop. I wanna know that my specs are enough or not.I have pentium M 186 GHz . and 1 GB Ram. Please let me know that I have to upgrade Ram or 1 GB is enough? any advise will be highly appreciated

Sie

It depends on what you want to run?

For a full lab 1GB wont be enough but you could manage to run a Windows 2003 Server and a XP Client (Or maybe two) but it depends what resource intensive applications/services you run on your machine.

Strip it down and only run what you need to run and you should get the three Virtual Machines, just remember to assign RAM correctly. (IE: Take your host OS ram off them split the rest between the VM's)

(I would also like to get my hands on one of those 186Ghz Processors!! )

HeroPsycho

Yeah, stick as much RAM as possible in there.

Remember, when you run out of RAM, you page. You're starved for disk i/o anyway, and without enough memory, you're gonna page like hell to a laptop hard drive that's probably not even 7200RPM, could very well be 4500RPM.

You might consider running your VM's on an external hard drive, too, or get a faster internal hard drive for this.

khantahmina

thank you guy for important advice. I will be preparing for 70-290. For now I will have one server 2003 and one client XP.I will strip down some of the application. I will upgrade to 2GB RAM for full lab in future.

mgeorge

If you went the route i did a few years ago, 4GB ram and a decent processor that supports
virtualization technology can simulate a whole network. Run 3-4 servers and a few clients.

Although you can do that with 2008 and Vista You'd be lucky to run a few virtual 08/vista
machines with out grinding ya workstation to a halt.

Talic

mgeorge27 wrote:

If you went the route i did a few years ago, 4GB ram and a decent processor that supports
virtualization technology can simulate a whole network. Run 3-4 servers and a few clients.

Although you can do that with 2008 and Vista You'd be lucky to run a few virtual 08/vista
machines with out grinding ya workstation to a halt.

So, Vista runs fewer clients/servers even with 4GBs of ram then XP does? Did you run XP 64bit to get all 4GB of ram?

Thats lame, I was expecting to get Vista 64bit and use all 4GBs of my ram while setting up a network.

HeroPsycho

Vista within a Guest OS doesn't run as well as XP, especially if Aero is turned on.

famosbrown

Well...you won't even be able to install Server 2008 without the minimum 512MB dedicated to the VM and even then, in my experience, it runs VERY slow with that minimum.

Talic

How does XP compare to Linux for setting up VM networks? Is the Linux version as developed as the Windows version of VMware? Wouldn't Linux have a advantage since its possible to get host 64bit versions easier?

Also, has anyone tried out VirtualBox? I heard its as good as VMware's workstation, just without the licensing fee.

Thiassi

Virtualbox and Vmware Workstation are both excellent products and it's worth trying out both.

I had a few problems with Virtualbox but I know others swear by it so I'm sure it was just my setup.

Try both. It can't do any harm.

HeroPsycho

Not anything against Virtualbox, but VMWare is the de facto virtualization product. Experience with VMWare products is also valued in addition to whatever you're using VMWare to learn.