Upgrades for VM

I was wondering what you guys would recommend as a upgrade for a older T61 to run Server 2008 and Linux on VM. The laptop has a 2GHz Core 2, 2 GB of DDR2 at 667MHz, and a 80 GB 5400 rpm HDD with windows 7 x86. I was thinking about upgrading the HDD since it seems like it's the weakest link but do you guys think I should look into getting 4 GBs of ram? All the ram slots are full so I'll need to replace the 2 sticks I have in there now. Either way it's a $80 upgrade and I'm just trying to figure out what would be the best bang for the buck.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

tiersten

Buy more RAM.

Talic

Do you guys think I should look into getting some Intel Turbo memory on top of either the HDD or more Ram? Intel® Turbo Memory with User Pinning

I remember it came out around the time of my laptop but I avoided buying it at the time.

tiersten

No. The biggest single upgrade you can do for your laptop for the minimum cost is to add more RAM. If you really want to speed up disk IO then buy a cheap SSD like the Intel X25-V or Kingston SSDNow V.

At the end of the day, how much you want to invest in this laptop? It isn't particularly new now.

Talic

I don't want to invest much at all, just have it be a bit smoother at running vms and maybe faster boots, the drive annoys me at times since it's so slow. The integrated graphics is annoying also.

I'm off to work so I'll check back late tonight.

dynamik

Then add a 7200 RPM drive.

tiersten

More RAM will increase HD performance because you won't be swapping as much.

dynamik

Wow, someone's sensitive

That was actually meant to go after your first post. I just went and got a couple of beers and read a book before coming back to this tab

tiersten

dynamik wrote: »

Wow, someone's sensitive

Psh. Overly touchy and self important in your case

My response was to Talic about wanting better HD performance.

aordal

I would buy one of these http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-40Y8725-Thinkpad-Serial-Adapter/dp/B000E0KGU0 and put a nice 7200RPM sata HDD in there. While RAM does limit the performance of VMs, so does the # of disks you have. This is a cheap/easy way to add another disk to your little laptop VM environment. I personally have one and it works well.

JDMurray

First thing is to download the technical manual for your laptop and see what's the best CPU, RAM, and hard drive it will take after the latest driver and BIOS updates are applied.

If the disk controller is very average then a 7200RPM disk won't give you much better performance, but the T61 should do well with it. Consider a CPU upgrade (your CPU is a Core 2 Duo and not a Core 2, which would be pretty old), and more RAM (4GB of DDR2) is the best you can do. Too bad you can't run an x64 OS on it.

MentholMoose

JDMurray wrote: »

First thing is to download the technical manual for your laptop and see what's the best CPU, RAM, and hard drive it will take after the latest driver and BIOS updates are applied.

If the disk controller is very average then a 7200RPM disk won't give you much better performance, but the T61 should do well with it. Consider a CPU upgrade (your CPU is a Core 2 Duo and not a Core 2, which would be pretty old), and more RAM (4GB of DDR2) is the best you can do. Too bad you can't run an x64 OS on it.

What matters is the actual CPU model number. The T61 uses the Merom Core 2 Duo CPU, all of which support 64-bit and XD, but not all of which support VT. All T7xxx and T5600 support VT, some T5500 do, the rest don't. These are all branded as Core 2 Duo. See Wikipedia.

At a Microsoft seminar I was at a couple months ago, the presenter had a couple T61 laptops running Server 2008 with Hyper-V (requires 64-bit, XD, and VT).

Talic

Mine is a 6465 CTO with a T7300 so it supports VT which I have going. It didn't help much though when I turned it on. I'm glad now I didn't cheap out and stick with the 1.8 ghz cpu. As for the Core 2 Duo thing, I was a bit in a hurry to write out the post before going to work so I took some short cuts. I hope the SATA controller isn't cheap, I paid almost a $1000 dollars for it when I bought it, more then most notebooks. The controller is rated at 1.5Gbps which is 1.0 but it might be just the drive. The controller supports NCQ and AHCI but it crashes the os when I take it it out of compatibility mode for the AHCI which I've been trying to figure out how to fix.

I like the idea about running Server 2008 on a T61, I have both R2 and R1 that I got from Dreamspark and I can install R2 to run as my laptop's OS. The class I'm taking is for Server 2008 and I'm probably going to learn a lot on managing Server 2008 so I think it may be a good idea to have the laptop as running as a little DC at home and during class. I know a couple things about making a Server machine a Domain Controller but do you guys think it would be a good idea to have it set up as one, the services running in the background has me wondering. This laptop was bought for mostly school in mind so...

MentholMoose

Talic wrote: »

Mine is a 6465 CTO with a T7300 so it supports VT which I have going. It didn't help much though when I turned it on. I'm glad now I didn't cheap out and stick with the 1.8 ghz cpu. As for the Core 2 Duo thing, I was a bit in a hurry to write out the post before going to work so I took some short cuts. I hope the SATA controller isn't cheap, I paid almost a $1000 dollars for it when I bought it, more then most notebooks. The controller is rated at 1.5Gbps which is 1.0 but it might be just the drive. The controller supports NCQ and AHCI but it crashes the os when I take it it out of compatibility mode for the AHCI which I've been trying to figure out how to fix.

I like the idea about running Server 2008 on a T61, I have both R2 and R1 that I got from Dreamspark and I can install R2 to run as my laptop's OS. The class I'm taking is for Server 2008 and I'm probably going to learn a lot on managing Server 2008 so I think it may be a good idea to have the laptop as running as a little DC at home and during class. I know a couple things about making a Server machine a Domain Controller but do you guys think it would be a good idea to have it set up as one, the services running in the background has me wondering. This laptop was bought for mostly school in mind so...

Installing Server 2008 R2 as the host would be good. You can enable the desktop experience to get Aero and all that good stuff so it looks like Windows 7. A DC, especially a test DC, is a prime candidate for virtualization. It won't use many resources, and for learning purposes it would be best if it is in a VM so you can easily revert changes for practice or troubleshooting, or wipe it out to start fresh.

pennystrader

ESXi will the memory ballon driver and overcommit will allow more virtual machines than Hyper-V can. if you really want the most bang for your buck use VMware.

astorrs

pennystrader wrote: »

ESXi will the memory ballon driver and overcommit will allow more virtual machines than Hyper-V can. if you really want the most bang for your buck use VMware.

While your statement is correct, the OP wants to use his laptop to actually run the VMs, using ESXi he would need an additional computer to actually connect to any of the VMs - hence the need for a hosted hypervisor.