Workstation Recommendation

Boss gave me the task (ie - no one else wants to do this) of re-doing a vm workstation here at work for testing purposes. So, I'm looking for some good hw recommendations. What they want to do is have one computer that we can run many vm's - so for Win 7, 8/8.1 and 10. This will be used for testing various customer scenarios with our audiology hardware and software.

We could DIY if necessary, or we could do pre-built. Preference around here is Lenovo.

Any suggestions?

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markulous

How many VMs are there going to be on at once? How many CPUs do they need? How much RAM does each one need? How much hard drive space?

Should be basic math that determines your hardware requirements. Obviously you'll need to overprovision a bit for the base OS, 20% hard drive space free, etc.

Essendon

Just make sure you get an SSD or two. Sit your testing VMs on the SSDs. Max the RAM out. These 2 are usually the bottlenecks for a lab/home rig.

GSXRules

ESXi will run more VMs than workstation. It it will be only for hosting and the hardware is compatible that is your best bet. Price is better also (free vs OS + WS)

wd40

I think if it is for work and you prefer Lenovo, you should get a Lenovo Workstation.

ThinkStation P Series Towers | Superior Performance and Reliability in a Workstation | Lenovo | Lenovo US

keenon

how much do you want to spend? there may be some other options as well. I use a dell t5600 with 64gb of ram but you may be able to build a beast for less than 900

UncleB

You guys are so last decade - get yourself an Azure account and setup VMs in the cloud. Completely flexible to spec as you need AND you get to work on new technology.

Why work with tech that is being left behind (VMWare seems to have missed the boat compared to Amazon, Azure and Google) and where licensing and training are probibitively expensive to use in anger. Make yourself the Subject Matter Expert on this and give your career & standing a boost.

You also do away with all the issues of housing, powering, cooling, cabling and securing physical boxes and don't need to deal with the purchasing or disposal of them. So very last decade.

All the templates are already online so you don't even need to worry about the OS installation sources. What's not to love about it.

Of course all this depends on your company not relying on dial up access to the internet as the standard...

OctalDump

UncleB wrote: »

You guys are so last decade - get yourself an Azure account and setup VMs in the cloud. Completely flexible to spec as you need AND you get to work on new technology..

My guess is this:

Bokeh wrote:

This will be used for testing various customer scenarios with our audiology hardware and software.

It's hard to attach hardware to "the cloud".

Which is also a complicating factor for virtualisation set ups, also. It depends on the hardware how complicating it might be.

UncleB

OctalDump wrote: »

It's hard to attach hardware to "the cloud".

Which is also a complicating factor for virtualisation set ups, also. It depends on the hardware how complicating it might be.

I would say all the more reason to test it to something that is hardware agnostic - customers have all sorts of hardware and it is impractical to emulate them all, so develop a SaaS solution that uses the could to deliver an audio stream to any browser and it will use whatever audio input/output the computer has. It also becomes platform independent at this time - what's not to love about it?

If the hardware is some specialist, niche product then there will be a problem testing even from a VM as it won't use the same hardware as the customers use in most cases.

Without knowing more about the hardware/software it has to support there is not a lot more we can recommend I guess.