Building a pc for hosting a large test lab

I plan on building a machine to assist with my studies. I want to build a large virtual network, with approx 20-30 VMs

I'd like to use SSD's if possible - a basic run down of specs would be i7 CPU, 64gb ram, 3 or 4 ssd drives. My main concern at moment is would 3 or 4 ssd drives cope with about 30 vm running at once?

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cyberguypr

That is a lot of VMs. What cert are you studying for?

rockstar81

At the moment mctip sa (using an old machine for this). I'd like to set up some child domains, exchange, sccm, citrix, appsense etc in not too far future

SteveLord

I can't imagine 30 VMs being anywhere near necessary. It also doesn't make financial sense to build something capable of that. You'd spend so much on the hardware and software...I doubt you'd have any money left to keep the electricity on afterward.

sratakhin

I'd say you need just one or two SSDs. Even if you run 30 VMs, it's very unlikely that they all will do any disk-intensive activities. Even a single SSD will provide enough IOs, but you may want to use SSDs in RAID 0 for more capacity. Last time I checked, a 256GB SSD was less than 200 bucks, but bigger drives are still too expensive.
I run about 5 VMs from a RAID 0 HDD array and don't have any problems.

MentholMoose

rockstar81 wrote: »

My main concern at moment is would 3 or 4 ssd drives cope with about 30 vm running at once?

One SSD will easily handle 20-30 VMs used for labbing. You may need to buy a larger SSD to have enough space, though. You can start with one 240 or 256 GB SSD and use it until you find that you need more space.

SteveLord

I think HDDs in RAID0 would suffice. Save you money, provide adequate performance and you would never run into the space issue.

eansdad

Is that 20-30 VMs running or just having 20-30 different VMs that can be ran? I don't think a single i7 could run that many VMs well. For drives SATA in a RAID set up will do just fine for a lab.

sratakhin

In our college, we used to have a couple of E5405 processors running about 30 VDI desktops. Everything was smooth, except when 10 people tried watching YouTube in full screen. E5405 is significantly slower than any of i7s.

Most of the time, the VMs will sit idle.

Bill3rdshift

If you really want to have 30 VM's for studying then just rent them from a cloud provider at minimal cost.

eansdad

sratakhin wrote: »

In our college, we used to have a couple of E5405 processors running about 30 VDI desktops. Everything was smooth, except when 10 people tried watching YouTube in full screen. E5405 is significantly slower than any of i7s.

Most of the time, the VMs will sit idle.

The E5405 is a quad core Xeon processor and a couple of them would definatly run 20-30 VMs but a single i7 would have trouble. A single i7 would be good to run 8-10 VMs. This is depending on what type of usage they want on those VMs. Not sure why OP would want SSDs for hard drives for testing. SATA would work fine. If OP wants they could RAID 0 2 SSDs for the OS and get a couple SATA drives in a RAID 5 for storage.

log32

It's gonna cost you a fortune, I really think an avg of 8 VMs are more than enough for any kind of cert.

rockstar81

I am happy to listen to advice and re do my VM lab plans

I guess I could break the labs down so that I concentrate on one specfic goal/tech in which case i agree i could get away with just needing no more than 10 vms running at once.

The choice to use SSD's was more about the noise and also hopefully being able to have more VMs running at once from one drive etc

As noted my main goals is to be able to test/practice microsoft,VMware,Citrix techs

log32

for an ESXi running 8 VMs you will need more than 16GB of RAM considering you allocate 2GB to each one, unless you plan on running Linux/Unix VMs with 512mb ram.

eansdad

I'm debating on building a desktop with an AMD 8-core 4.0GHz with 32GB ram, 2x 120GB SSDs for OS and 4x 1 TB HDs cost about $1500 or just buy a Dell PowerEdge 2950 2x 3.0HGz Xeon Quad cores, 32GB ram and 4x 1 TB HDs for around $1000. I'm leaning toward the PowerEdge.

AlexNguyen

Instead of a bulky desktop, you could go for a performant laptop. A Lenovo W series laptop can have up to 32 GB of RAM (8 GB x 4 DIMMS), 2 hard disks and a 1920x1080 screen resolution.

sratakhin

I have a desktop with an i5 2500k and a couple of hard drives in RAID 0. The only time it feels slow is when I resume all VMs at once. It takes about 5 seconds to resume a DC running 2003, but I can wait.
2GB for each VM is overkill. If the OP plans to deploy DCs, DHCP servers and such, 512MB to each machine would be enough, at least for Server 2k3 and 2k8.

SteveLord

AlexNguyen wrote: »

Instead of a bulky desktop, you could go for a performant laptop. A Lenovo W series laptop can have up to 32 GB of RAM (8 GB x 4 DIMMS), 2 hard disks and a 1920x1080 screen resolution.

And perform half as good as a desktop yet cost twice as much.

gc8dc95

eansdad wrote: »

I'm debating on building a desktop with an AMD 8-core 4.0GHz with 32GB ram, 2x 120GB SSDs for OS and 4x 1 TB HDs cost about $1500 or just buy a Dell PowerEdge 2950 2x 3.0HGz Xeon Quad cores, 32GB ram and 4x 1 TB HDs for around $1000. I'm leaning toward the PowerEdge.

I like the poweredge but remember it is an actual server and has a significant noise factor. I like my 2950, but you won't want to be sitting next to it for hours.

discount81

Some of you are a bit too conservative.

This isn't a production environment it is a lab, and i7 and 32GB of ram with a couple SSD drives will run 20+ VMs with ease in vSphere5.

I use a an AMD 3650 2.6GHz quad core cpu and 32GB ram, I have a Synology Diskstation for my disks over NFS
Right now it has 15 virtual machines running, mixture of mostly Windows 2008 R2 with some Linux and BSD

CPU usage is 12% and RAM usage is 70% with almost no performance issues.

I've run 25+ at once before, performance does suffer but it was still fine to use.

It would of been on for nearly a year straight if it was not for some purple screen of death problems with iSCSI, which is why I run NFS now.

I am thinking myself of selling the Synology diskstation, getting 2 x 256GB SSD and putting my 2x2TB and making my own FreeNAS setup instead, which would increase the performance a lot.

eansdad

Yes but you are running a NAS (Synology Diskstation) which should be taking some of the load off the lab PC. OP is talking about running everything off 1 machine.

Back to point though with OP about his/her set up .. You don't need SSDs for the lab as SATA is fine. If you're want to spend the money for SSDs why not just go SAS?

pizzaboy

Or better still a fusion-io drive. Would love to test drive one of those things.

Bloogen

If it was me

I WOULD
- Use 1 or 2 SSD's
- Use a desktop based form factor
- Use the i7
- Probably start with 16GB depending on the cost to do 32GB
- Save money by running it on my existing AMD quad core desktop using VMWare Workstation with a RAM upgrade to save money (saving money is not an issue for everyone)

I would NOT
- Run 20-30 VM's at one time other than just because. Most labs need 1-3 and almost all less than 10 from what I've seen.
- Use a 1U server due to noise and space.
- Use SAS hard drives. Too expensive, not worth it compared to a couple SSD's.

Comments:
- 'Offloading' to a NAS probably lowers performance vs direct attached SSD's in most if not all cases.
- I think with most med-high end quad core cpu's you won't have a CPU usage issue. RAM will likely be needed first.
- Sounds fun!

In conclusion I will say from experience try not to get too distracted by the tools past a point where there is no ROI. I dreamt up and planned a lab for a while only to conclude I could finish my MCSA 2008/12 and MCSE's with the desktop I already own with VMWare Workstation with pretty much 0 issues.

bdub

I agree with others here that you really do not need to go all out on hardware and what are thinking is plenty. And really 30 VM's is overkill for MCITP/MSCE. I did all my labs with 8-10 VM's.

What I think would be far more useful than running a bunch of VM's on a single host is building a cluster. At least then you can play around with HA and migrating VM's etc...

gunbunnysoulja

I run 10 VM's for <$200. Using the cheapest Sandy Bridge Celeron Processor & H55 motherboard. 8GB ram.

Not sure why people think it costs a fortune. If I had 16GB, I could run 20+. Server 2008, Windows 7, etc.

Using Citrix XenServer 5.6 SP2.

eansdad

gunbunnysoulja wrote: »

I run 10 VM's for <$200. Using the cheapest Sandy Bridge Celeron Processor & H55 motherboard. 8GB ram.

Not sure why people think it costs a fortune. If I had 16GB, I could run 20+. Server 2008, Windows 7, etc.

Using Citrix XenServer 5.6 SP2.

Details.....

gunbunnysoulja

G530 processor (ie. cheap, slow dual core with no HT or VT-d, but has VT-x), cheapest H55, 320GB HDD, 8GB DDR3 Ram, Cheapest case w/power supply...

Using Citrix XenServer 5.6SP2 as HyperVisor. No HCL issues. Using XenCenter to install VM's from Windows machine. Using XenDesktop to access VM's remotely, and work amazing over LAN/WAN. Have had many people in my company use my VM's over VPN and tell me how fast they run, even with 512 (XP/Servers) - 1GB (Windows 7) ram.

Got Domain Controllers, DNS Servers, XenApp Servers, XP machines, Linux Machines, Windows 7 Machines, etc.. all running together really well. I allocate 2 cores per (even though I only have 2 total anyways), and my CPU utilization still never gets high.

discount81

Yeah you won't need 20 VMs for an MCITP.

However he mentioned he is going to use other stuff.

I have SCCM2012, Exchange (need to get around to studying those 2 more), Multiple Sharepoint servers, multiple SQL servers.

Some virtual vyatta and JunOS routers for networking labs and proof of design.
I like testing Firewalls out

When you are studying multiple things having 20 VMs isn't out of the question.

bdub wrote: »

I agree with others here that you really do not need to go all out on hardware and what are thinking is plenty. And really 30 VM's is overkill for MCITP/MSCE. I did all my labs with 8-10 VM's.

What I think would be far more useful than running a bunch of VM's on a single host is building a cluster. At least then you can play around with HA and migrating VM's etc...

kriscamaro68

After using SSD's in my lab I would never go back. I had a raid 0 with 3 western digital blacks and this out performas those when all vm's are being used. Just buy a 6 core intel that costs $550 then buy 64gb of ram for $300 and 2 256gb samsung SSD's for $170 a piece and a $350 mobo and call it good. Now this is bulding it with a sandy bridge-e CPU and things are more expensive with those setups.