How many virtual machines do I need to run in preparation for the 70-640

benmarkbenmark Member Posts: 16 ■□□□□□□□□□
in MCTS / MCITP on Windows 2008 General
How many virtual machines do I need to run in preparation for the 70-640? Just curious on how many extra hard drives I will need. I've read it is best to use a single drive per virtual machine or is that overkill? Thanks guys!
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  • jmritenourjmritenour Member Posts: 565
    What are you using for virtualization? VMware worskstation 7 on my experience has issues with disk I/O in multiple VMs but generally speaking, unless there are several heavily utilized production VMsm then one physical disk per VM is way overkill. I've had about 8 20003/2008 VMs going at once on lapto with a 7200 RPM drive on virtualbox, and my RAM (4GB) was much more of a limiting factor.
    "Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible; suddenly, you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi
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  • KenCKenC Member Posts: 131
    I used VirtualBox on my laptop for labs when studying for MCSA 2003 and once all the VMs had started up, there was never any issue for lab scenarios. Remember it is only for lab and training purposes. As jmritenour noted, RAM was much more of a limiting factor.

    If you do need to purchase hard drive(s) for your VMs, which you more than likely will, treat yourself to a SSD drive instead and split that up.

    With regards to how many VMs you will need for the 70-640, as many as it takes to cover the topics properly (which will vary as you progress).
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  • coty24coty24 Member Posts: 263 ■□□□□□□□□□
    Today I installed server 2008 R2 on my desktop, now I use hyper V and it's pretty awesome. If you are in college go to www.dreamspark.com and get an account. Then you can get server for free and not hassle with the other stuff. I used virtual box before as well and It wasn't a problem. I work on servers at work, so it made more sense to go that route. as far as the HDD's you can get a 2 TB for like 70 bucks now. For the VM's I would allocate like 40GB's per. I hope this helped; I'm going for the same cert. Pe@ce
    Passed LOT2 :)Working on FMV2(CHFI v8 ) Done!
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  • earweedearweed Member Posts: 5,192 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Certificate services and federated services require quite a few vms to lab them up properly. You probably wont want to get a HDD for each vm for these. I had only 2 HDDs and was able to do the exwercises in the book plus a few things of my own without a problem.
    No longer work in IT. Play around with stuff sometimes still and fix stuff for friends and relatives.
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  • benmarkbenmark Member Posts: 16 ■□□□□□□□□□
    Since I've had experience with virtual box I think that is what I will use. I have 8GB of RAM, so i believe that should be enough. I'd like to get an SSD but I don't want to be limited to 128GB after acquiring all certs (hopefully). I saw a nice deal on a 1.5TB 6Gb/s drive. Thanks for all the help. I love this forum. So much great advice; you guys are the best.
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  • sherrillsherrill Member Posts: 54 ■■□□□□□□□□
    My setup seems to go against the grain for everyone else. But, works for me, I passed the 640 and am using the same for the 642.

    I built a box with a single TB drive, i7 quad core, and 12G of memory. I'm running Win7Pro and using VmWare Player to run the VM's. No problems running any of the scenarios, especially the FS when you have to have 7-8 machines going at once. IMHO, memory and proc are the key.
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