Reply to: Laptops + Virtual Servers

[DS23]

wait for sandybridge (.... well after the fix.....).

nope. too late. it arrives today. i can't be waiting for the next gen (there's always another next gen) i need the best available power now.

[css_jay99]

thanks sc good luck.

i should be able to answer your initial question soon. a maxed out macpro is due to land shortly. <rubs hands with glee>

wait for sandybridge (.... well after the fix.....).

[DS23]

thanks sc good luck.

i should be able to answer your initial question soon. a maxed out macpro is due to land shortly. <rubs hands with glee>

[Spacecadet]

any news on how this went spacecadet?

Unfortunately between starting Uni and work I've not had a huge amount of time.

What I've found so far is that it still needs a bit of tweaking - there appears to be a rather bad conflict between the VM setup (Windows Server 2003) and my graphics card. End result, the display locks up
Although I only seem to have seen this when trying to remote desktop on to the VM rather than just using the VMware console session.

At the moment I'm running the windows updates, only 69 of them! My laptop is still usable and the VM is just chugging its way through the install process

I've still got to get SQL Server installed and tested a job for this weekend maybe!

[Sysman]

Be careful if you use your laptop on battery much - then you need to consider whether the Quad core processor is going to reduce battery life.

A former colleague has just spotted someone with an 8 core laptop in the office. Apparently the power brick for "this behemoth" is "huge". It probably weights a ton.

[DS23]

Right, I've got the hard drive in optical bay enclosure ordered, it should be here before christmas.
If I remember I'll reply and let you know how I got on!

any news on how this went spacecadet?

[Sysman]

First hit on Google (search phrase "pc disk in ram" - plain "ramdisk" might get you further)

A free trial is available. I might give that a whirl myself.

Update: I got that working and plonked a VirtualBox disk with Ubuntu Server on it. Once you've got it set up as you like You can indeed change it so that it doesn't write changes back to the disk image.

It will also nip in at system startup, grab the memory it requires and load the contents into the RAM disk. Hmm yes - where has my memory gone?

I did find a free version out there, but the only sites I found offering it looked dodgy, so I didn't pursue that.

[Spacecadet]

Right, I've got the hard drive in optical bay enclosure ordered, it should be here before christmas.
If I remember I'll reply and let you know how I got on!

[MrRobin]

Hmmm, if disk performance is a bottleneck, try slapping one of these babys in yer rig:

HEXUS.net - News :: LSI announces astoundingly fast PCIe SSD : Page - 1/1

[Sysman]

Do any VM hosts allow you to use RAM as a virtual disk?

First hit on Google (search phrase "pc disk in ram" - plain "ramdisk" might get you further)

A free trial is available. I might give that a whirl myself.

[VectraMan]

I gather that these combo disks are quite intelligent; they are using the SSD component as a cache for the hard disk component.

Do any VM hosts allow you to use RAM as a virtual disk? A lot of the time with VMs you want to use it, then revert back to the previous snapshop, and rather than writing to the VHD and then reverting it, it would make more sense to not write anything to disk and treat changes as temporary.

I have a build machine in a VM, and the total size of the checkout, temporary build files etc. is about 2.5GB. In theory if the host could emulate a hard disk in RAM, the whole thing could sit in RAM and be much faster, without the guest being any the wiser.

[Sysman]

Yep. I would suggest getting a laptop with a couple of hard-disks and 'kin tonnes of RAM.

WHS. I've seen a dramatic difference from using 2 disks in my tower PC. When it was still a single disk system, doing anything hefty in the background would slow the installation of Windows into a VM to a snail's pace. Spreading the workload across 2 disks can make a huge difference.

A colleague recently got one of those combined SSD + hard disk jobbies for his MacBook Pro (a Seagate if I remember correctly). He fired up Word to demonstrate the difference, and I kid you not, it was there just as fast as other machines would bring an already launched app from the background. I gather that these combo disks are quite intelligent; they are using the SSD component as a cache for the hard disk component.

It wasn't outraegously expensive either.

[doodab]

If what you are doing is memory intensive then you'll need lots of memory, at least enough to support the host OS + whatever is allocated to the VMs without swapping.

Laptop disks are a bottleneck full stop, I've found that even using a separate external disk for the VMs. In my desktop I have 4 x 7.2k disks in a RAID array which improves things, however the best performance I have obtained is from the SSD in my laptop.

In fact when I got my first SSD I had it in an external enclosure (I bought it specifically to speed up an install of some commercial software on top of a windows + oracle DB VM that would run for 6-8 hours before failing) and apart from the install taking less than 20 minutes once I worked around all the foibles that caused it to fail I found that the windows running in the VM with the virtual disk located on the SSD was more responsive than the host OS installed on a 7.2k rpm laptop drive and I ended up using it for all sorts of everyday tasks.

For what I use it for (VMware workstation with linux or windows OS, oracle or SQL server databases, various J2EE app servers / web apps, often with another VM holding windows hosted dev tools, as well as a bit of faffing with computationally demanding stuff like FPGA synthesis in my spare time) I would certainly spend the money on an SSD over a quad-core processor, although of course having both wouldn't hurt.

[VectraMan]

If they are just development servers, then is max. performance vital?

WHS. If the VMs are doing nothing 99% of the time, the only real impact they'll be having is the amount of RAM they'll use.

[yorkshireman]

If they are just development servers, then is max. performance vital? I have a number of development (and production servers) running in the Amazon Cloud (which runs Xen for virtualisation) and they all use the "small" machine image because for most things "small" is good enough.

You may well find your existing laptop is sufficient for what you need. Have you test installed any VMs on it?

I always look at what Dell has on special offer at the time I am buying a new laptop - because sometimes these upgrades are virtually given away - particularly at their end of quarter/year. If you run a lot of simultaneous hosts then plenty of RAM would be my first priority.

Be careful if you use your laptop on battery much - then you need to consider whether the Quad core processor is going to reduce battery life.

Have you decided what host operating system you are going to run on the laptop yet?