i5-3320M good enough for virtual machines?

I will buy a w530. Will i be able to run 3-4 vms simultaneously with a i5-3320M, or should i give more money?

 

Depends what you'll be doing with those VMs, but it should be fine.

 

Well, practically anything "should be fine."

A W530 with any dual-core CPU (i5 or i7) has only 2 RAM slots. "3-4" VMs need "lots of" RAM and virtual processors. I'd go with a quad-core i7 and bump up the RAM as high as I can afford it.

 

I will use them to install a variety of applications and test their compatibility within several OSes.

Watching videos with reasonable ease within the VMs would be nice.

Running 3-4 VMs simultaneously would also be nice for making presentations to customers

You don't think that 16GB RAM should be enough for say 2 windows and 2 linux VMs?

The i5-3320M also futures Hyper-Threading, doesn't that also help?

 

As a general answer? No.

Sure. How many virtual cores?

 

The CPU will handle any number of VM's as long as you don't overload all of them at once. As for RAM, 16GB is enough to build a small forest of domains. I used to be able to run 50 VM's (using a system with 32GB RAM and a quad core) at once including a couple of Exchange DAGs, and a fully blown System Center 2012. Right now, I have a 3360M+8GB RAM and am fine running all my virtualization projects (host OS is Server 2012 Datacenter). So yeah, you should be ok with a 3320m.

 

Ok, you're of course right. I'm just trying to see if i can save some money and still being able to work with VMs.

The 3630M does not feature VT-d. I thought that was a prerequisite for virtualization work.

 

It doesn't sound to me like your usage case is too intensive, so a system with the i5-3320M + 16GB (2x8GB) RAM should be more than enough.

 

Understood. Just trying to help.

Not really.

 

If you keep Windows as host OS, VT-d does not matter as no virtualization software (VMWare, Virtual Box etc) supported it last time I checked.

Get as big SSD as you can afford though, as running multiple VMs with snapshots etc. is one of the areas where SSDs make especially big difference.

 

So you're saying that Linux is much better as host OS? Running Linux host (with which virtualization sotware?) will that make a difference in the case of i5-3320M? I'm also eyeing a system with an i7-3820QM, but it costs 900€ more.

Doing impressive VM presentations for customers is quite important though, and being able to e.g. reasonably play youtube videos inside VMs would be a good thing.

Apart from the extra money, quad cores appear to have some heating issues as all 4 cores always stay on even if just browsing news articles. Wrt the W530, i read about excessive fan noise, which nevertheless appears to have been solved with a bios update that lowered fan rpm.

My laptop will be in any case cooler and quieter with a i5-3320M than with an i7-3820M, isn't that so?

 

I'd rather use a capable system to impress my customers. (It would be more helpful if you had listed a few key technical requirements in your OP.)

The fan noise is related to the fan part and the way the fan speed is managed. Even certain T430 and T530 with low-end i5 CPUs exhibit obnoxious fan noise!