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    What the main bottleneck running 3 VMWare VM on T500?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by chukwe, May 14, 2009.

  1. chukwe

    chukwe Notebook Evangelist

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    I'm planning to run 3 VMWare Machines at the same simultaneously on my T500.

    What'll slow it down? Harddrive(320gb 5400rpm), RAM(4GB), CPU (T9550 2.66GHz) or GPU?
     
    chukwe, May 14, 2009
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  2. jonlumpkin

    jonlumpkin NBR Transmogrifier

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    Hard drive will be the first bottleneck without doubt.

    RAM could become an issue as well, but that is generally only a problem if you are running multiple VMs simultaneously and/or both your host and client OS require a large amount of memory.

    I would recommend either using two harddrives (one in 2.5" bay, and one in UltraBay adapter) with your host OS on one, and your VMs on the other. Alternatively an SSD can be a good choice as well, but you may be somewhat handicapped by size.

    I don't think the CPU will be a bottleneck. Even if it were, you don't have many options up from there.
     
    jonlumpkin, May 14, 2009
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  3. Renee

    Renee Notebook Virtuoso

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    I don't know whether it helps or not but I'd agree with john.
     
    Renee, May 14, 2009
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  4. chukwe

    chukwe Notebook Evangelist

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    I've ordered a 64gb SSD as John suggested. The only problem will be RAM as 8gb RAM is very expensive
     
    chukwe, May 14, 2009
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  5. jonlumpkin

    jonlumpkin NBR Transmogrifier

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    I don't dispute that at all. 4GB is probably enough, but it really depends on the VMs you are running (i.e. if you are running two instances of Vista inside of Vista [I can't imagine why] you would have serious problems with memory).

    Just get it with 4GB and test it out. If you are seriously short of memory with the applications you run it is easy, albeit expensive, to go to 6GB or 8GB after the fact.


    One other thing - Because you have an SSD, the penalty for paging to disk (using virtual memory) is far lower than if you were to use a conventional hard drive. It's still best to avoid paging if possible (RAM is much faster than NAND flash, and much much much faster than a spinning drive), but you might find the performance adequate as long as it pages out the portions of memory that you don't actively need.
     
    jonlumpkin, May 14, 2009
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