Lab Setup

I recently purchased a new laptop for using as a lab enviroment to practice for the exam. Here are the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T5870, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 256MB Video Card, etc.

How many instances of VMWare or Virtual PC will I be able to run at the same time, and also, what would you recommend I have as far as the number of client and servers set up in VMWare or Virtual PC? Should I consider upgrading to 4GB RAM?

Thanks in advance!

Find more posts tagged with

SAVE $250 on Your Boot Camp — Use Code "EXAM26"

Exclusively for TechExams members for Infosec Boot Camps starting before April 30, 2026

View Boot Camps

Comments

dynamik

It depends on how you configure your VM's RAM usage. I typically run basic Server 2003 VMs with 256MB and XP clients with 128MB. If you do Exchange, SQL, etc., you'll have to adjust that accordingly. There is a relatively small amount of overhead for each VM as well as whatever your host OS is using. With RAM being as cheap as it is, I'd definitely upgrade to 4GB. Also consider getting another disk or two to distribute the load if you want to get a lot of VMs running. I've found a single disk to be my largest bottleneck.

Johnny Johnson

dynamik wrote: »

Also consider getting another disk or two to distribute the load if you want to get a lot of VMs running. I've found a single disk to be my largest bottleneck.

So adding an external hard drive will eliminate bottleneck?

dynamik

It will alleviate it. All your VMs will be competing for disk resources, so if you put three VMs on three disks, they will run much better than nine VMs on one disk. It's not a necessity, but it might be something you want to think about as you progress and start running more simultaneously.