Desktop or Server Motherboard

jamesbrown

Guys, i am trying to build a custom PC myself and i am wondering what I should do or I'm confused on what to do. I will be using it for the MCITP:EA exam. i know 70-640 requires at least 12VMs to be running at thesame time so i want something really powerful. should i build a server with Xeon or a desktop with i7.

please, advise.

Essendon

Go with a desktop if money is an issue. Cheaper RAM, cheaper HDD's. Not to mention a desktop can be fixed by just about any repair shop down the road. Get an i7, max out the RAM (get like 24GB on a decent motherboard if you can afford it), and you'll be laughing. Chuck in SSD's if you can and you are good to go. If the SSD are too expensive, you can go with usual ones.

Most of these exams only need 3-5 VM's, I can only remember the RMS lab needing like 7-8 VM's, apart from that you can easily get by with 3-5 VM's, but like they say, the more the merrier!

RobertKaucher

I would say that is totally overkill. 12 VMs?

If you really want to run that type of environment the only things that really matter are
1. the number of disks and capacity
2. the amount of RAM

In no way should you worry about the processor. Get an i7 board that will support as close to 24 GB RAM as possible. If you really want to be running 12 VMs you may just want to build 2 systems.

cyberguypr

Where did you read about the 12 concurrent VMs? That sounds insanely high. Even in the MOC they have you shut down unused VMs. Keep in mind that you can run some VMs with the bare minimum memory assigned, they'll just be slow. Also, some roles can coexist and do not really require a separate box.

the_Grinch

Would this do the trick?

Newegg.com - ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

jamesbrown

cyberguypr wrote: »

Where did you read about the 12 concurrent VMs? That sounds insanely high. Even in the MOC they have you shut down unused VMs. Keep in mind that you can run some VMs with the bare minimum memory assigned, they'll just be slow. Also, some roles can coexist and do not really require a separate box.

The Max VM that should be running in the 70-640 exam is 6-8.

jamesbrown

the_Grinch wrote: »

Would this do the trick?

Newegg.com - ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

This motherboard will definitely work. I'll would try to see what i can come up with today. I really want to build this PC as soon as possible.

jamesbrown

Essendon wrote: »

Go with a desktop if money is an issue. Cheaper RAM, cheaper HDD's. Not to mention a desktop can be fixed by just about any repair shop down the road. Get an i7, max out the RAM (get like 24GB on a decent motherboard if you can afford it), and you'll be laughing. Chuck in SSD's if you can and you are good to go. If the SSD are too expensive, you can go with usual ones.

Most of these exams only need 3-5 VM's, I can only remember the RMS lab needing like 7-8 VM's, apart from that you can easily get by with 3-5 VM's, but like they say, the more the merrier!

Can you recommend a better motherboard for me?

demonfurbie

dont forget to look at the gaming hardware

i make alot of servers using gaming hardware over server boards

jamesbrown

demonfurbie wrote: »

dont forget to look at the gaming hardware

i make alot of servers using gaming hardware over server boards

Im looking up one right now. Can you recommend one. I have never built a PC myself.

Krunchi

jamesbrown wrote: »

Can you recommend a better motherboard for me?

Newegg.com - ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

I'm using this MB with the Intel Sandy Bridge I7 2600K and 16 gig's of ram. I have ran up to 6 2008 R2 vm's and 2 win 7 Vm's with out any issues.

As for 12 vm's don't think you'll run that many at once I'm taking the 640 cert next week and the most vm's I have run at once was Eight and that was over kill.

If you want my full PC build let me know i't is so smoking fast it's unreal I have never locked it up or bogged it down been trying just can't do it.

A few tip's for labbing that work's for me is use a separate drive for your VM's and use a VHD to dual boot into 2008 R2 and run your VM's there also defrag your VM drive once a week.

jamesbrown

Krunchi wrote: »

Newegg.com - ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

I'm using this MB with the Intel Sandy Bridge I7 2600K and 16 gig's of ram. I have ran up to 6 2008 R2 vm's and 2 win 7 Vm's with out any issues.

As for 12 vm's don't think you'll run that many at once I'm taking the 640 cert next week and the most vm's I have run at once was Eight and that was over kill.

If you want my full PC build let me know i't is so smoking fast it's unreal I have never locked it up or bogged it down been trying just can't do it.

A few tip's for labbing that work's for me is use a separate drive for your VM's and use a VHD to dual boot into 2008 R2 and run your VM's there also defrag your VM drive once a week.

Can you give me your full PC built.

Krunchi

jamesbrown wrote: »

Can you give me your full PC built.

Here you go

Newegg.com - Once You Know, You Newegg

Like the post a few up said you cant go wrong with gaming hardware it is made to perform and it does.

You can go cheaper on a few things but you need to watch the cooling these things run pretty hot if you don't pick the right hardware.

This systems runs nice and cool and is very quiet and can handle anything you throw at it if you need some more help just ask.

The two 1 TB drives can setup for Raid 0 for more speed the 500 Gig drive is my VM drive.

Here is the link for how to setup a VHD if you want go that route.
http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=2193041

jamesbrown

Krunchi wrote: »

Here you go

Newegg.com - Once You Know, You Newegg

Like the post a few up said you cant go wrong with gaming hardware it is made to perform and it does.

You can go cheaper on a few things but you need to watch the cooling these things run pretty hot if you don't pick the right hardware.

This systems runs nice and cool and is very quiet and can handle anything you throw at it if you need some more help just ask.

The two 1 TB drives can setup for Raid 0 for more speed the 500 Gig drive is my VM drive.

Here is the link for how to setup a VHD if you want go that route.
How to install Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Windows 7 on the same partition, from Colin Smith - White Papers, Webcasts and Case Studies - ZDNet

You spent a lot of money on your toy. I didn't buy some of the stuff but i'm at $960.

Krunchi

jamesbrown wrote: »

You spent a lot of money on your toy. I didn't buy some of the stuff but i'm at $960.

That was just the basic's all the extras made my wife scream and yell at me.

Stuff like the Case, Power Supply, Video card, NIC, Sound Card, Card reader and the extra drives can be changed are removed.

The processor can be changed but I would stick with Intel the I5 2500K is great and a little cheaper. Stay away from AMD right now Intel has them bet at the moment on performance by allot.

As for the memory you could change the brand and save maybe 20 bucks to go cheap but I highly advise to stick with the Corsair ram on the list, I have bought 2 sets of them for two computers and have had zero issues.

As for the heat sink and the thermal paste they are a must have. don't go cheap there.

You can shoot my a private message if you want more help are keep it going here good luck on building that new computer and the lab's

jamesbrown

Krunchi wrote: »

That was just the basic's all the extras made my wife scream and yell at me.

Stuff like the Case, Power Supply, Video card, NIC, Sound Card, Card reader and the extra drives can be changed are removed.

The processor can be changed but I would stick with Intel the I5 2500K is great and a little cheaper. Stay away from AMD right now Intel has them bet at the moment on performance by allot.

As for the memory you could change the brand and save maybe 20 bucks to go cheap but I highly advise to stick with the Corsair ram on the list, I have bought 2 sets of them for two computers and have had zero issues.

As for the heat sink and the thermal paste they are a must have. don't go cheap there.

You can shoot my a private message if you want more help are keep it going here good luck on building that new computer and the lab's

Can I just add another power supply? The one you bought is sold out?

MentholMoose

jamesbrown wrote: »

Can I just add another power supply? The one you bought is sold out?

Yes, PSUs are generally interchangeable. Do you plan on playing games on this PC you're planning to build? If you don't have (or plan to ever install) a gaming video card, you don't need an expensive PSU... $40-50 from a name brand is fine. I don't recommend skimping out on the PSU (e.g. no name under $20) since I've seen cheap PSUs die and kill other components too many times.

If you are just building a lab machine that needs to run VMs (e.g. in VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V), you can build a machine with good quality components for about $500. For labbing the three things you need to worry about, in order of importance, are storage, RAM, and CPU (basically the opposite of a gaming rig).

• Storage - A huge hard drive is unnecessary... a 1TB drive could store 100 VMs each with a 10GB virtual disk, but you might be able to run 10 of them simultaneously, if you're lucky (5 is more realistic, or even fewer if you are doing anything disk intensive). Get more, smaller drives.
• RAM - I did my SA, EA, and EDA7 on a box with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB seems to be the sweet spot right now... about $100 will get you good quality DDR3 from a name brand (lifetime warranty). That's what I paid for 8GB of DDR2 when I built my lab machine in early 2009.
• CPU - For labbing, what matters is simply the core count. The exception would be ultra-budget CPUs meant for netbooks and nettops (e.g. Intel Atom), which aren't really suitable for labbing.

If you want to build a machine specifically for labbing, I recommend finding the cheapest quad or hex-core CPU with virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x, AMD-V) you can and building a machine around it. AMD has sub-$100 quad-core CPUs ($140 gets you hex-core), so for a lab machine that is what I'd recommend. A $200+ CPU is great for gaming, video editing, CAD, and similar use cases, but for labbing it is not necessary to spend that much. If you have a lot of VMs running, a $140 hex-core CPU is likely to outperform a $300 quad-core.

Chances are, however, that when labbing you will run out of disk performance long before hitting any CPU bottleneck. At my last job I had a cluster of eight XenServer hosts running Windows XP VMs... each server only had eight cores (two quad-core Opterons) and 64GB of RAM, but one of those hosts could run 100+ VMs because the storage could handle it. That environment, however, was STILL limited by storage... if I actually tried to spin up 800 VMs in that cluster, I'm sure the storage would have died. I sized the VMs so there would be about 40 VMs per host max (typically 20-30).

jamesbrown

MentholMoose wrote: »

Yes, PSUs are generally interchangeable. Do you plan on playing games on this PC you're planning to build? If you don't have (or plan to ever install) a gaming video card, you don't need an expensive PSU... $40-50 from a name brand is fine. I don't recommend skimping out on the PSU (e.g. no name under $20) since I've seen cheap PSUs die and kill other components too many times.

If you are just building a lab machine that needs to run VMs (e.g. in VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V), you can build a machine with good quality components for about $500. For labbing the three things you need to worry about, in order of importance, are storage, RAM, and CPU (basically the opposite of a gaming rig).

• Storage - A huge hard drive is unnecessary... a 1TB drive could store 100 VMs each with a 10GB virtual disk, but you might be able to run 10 of them simultaneously, if you're lucky (5 is more realistic, or even fewer if you are doing anything disk intensive). Get more, smaller drives.
• RAM - I did my SA, EA, and EDA7 on a box with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB seems to be the sweet spot right now... about $100 will get you good quality DDR3 from a name brand (lifetime warranty). That's what I paid for 8GB of DDR2 when I built my lab machine in early 2009.
• CPU - For labbing, what matters is simply the core count. The exception would be ultra-budget CPUs meant for netbooks and nettops (e.g. Intel Atom), which aren't really suitable for labbing.

If you want to build a machine specifically for labbing, I recommend finding the cheapest quad or hex-core CPU with virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x, AMD-V) you can and building a machine around it. AMD has sub-$100 quad-core CPUs ($140 gets you hex-core), so for a lab machine that is what I'd recommend. A $200+ CPU is great for gaming, video editing, CAD, and similar use cases, but for labbing it is not necessary to spend that much. If you have a lot of VMs running, a $140 hex-core CPU is likely to outperform a $300 quad-core.

Chances are, however, that when labbing you will run out of disk performance long before hitting any CPU bottleneck. At my last job I had a cluster of eight XenServer hosts running Windows XP VMs... each server only had eight cores (two quad-core Opterons) and 64GB of RAM, but one of those hosts could run 100+ VMs because the storage could handle it. That environment, however, was STILL limited by storage... if I actually tried to spin up 800 VMs in that cluster, I'm sure the storage would have died. I sized the VMs so there would be about 40 VMs per host max (typically 20-30).

I already bought all the parts to build my new pc. I will actually be using the PC for TV recording, Streaming videos to iphone, Labbing and hosting my personal website. I'll also be labbing and doing a lot of research\testing on the machine. I went with a Sandy Intel proccessor - quad -core, 16gig RAM, 128-bit video card, 1T hard drive, I also have a 500 and 250GiG hard drive. Who knows I might play games on it in the long run. I have two PC running right now for TV recording and the other for web server. My goal is to get rid of both PC and just use the new PC build for it.

I really thank you guys for your help:
@Krunchi - thank you very much. I'll try to post my PC build here so other people can see: Total price: $1,113.91

@demonfurbie - I went with a gaming hareware - a CPU cooler

Thanks everyone.

Devilsbane

12 seems a bit extreme. I did MCSE with about 5 which was much overkill. I usually only had 2 or 3 powered on at a time.