Spec'ing a new workstation rig for my office
-
I am tired of having multiple PC's in my home office mucking up my desk and making it harder to work on client's PC's. I was looking at a Asus with i7 32GB RAM and 1tb drive. The goal was to have VM's of earlier versions of Windows and be able to use one of them for Data recovery if possible.
Would I be better off with a workstation using Xeons? I want my daily use of the PC to feel as if nothing else is happening while running the VMs.
-
Hard to imagine needing a Xeon for IT work. How many VMs do you plan to run and what do you intend to have them doing?
-
yeah, I have an HP Elite i7 with 8 gb of ram. I dont run vms, that's what my server is for. and i dont need all that horsepower, neither do you
but if you want it, buy it. -
I run on an ancient Phenom II X3 with 4GB and it is great for me. A little more power wouldn't be bad, but it boots in like six seconds and works really well.
-
W7 VM for data recovery.
W7, Vista and XP VMs, also need XP to recover my Office Accounting 2007 data
VM to setup and check out Mint.
VM for a Virtual Lab for testing Server 2012r2 (Can you run VMs inside VMs with their own Vnetwork?)
-
@technobabble said:
VM for a Virtual Lab for testing Server 2012r2 (Can you run VMs inside VMs with their own Vnetwork?)
yes but you really start hurting performance.
-
@scottalanmiller Noted!
-
sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host.
-
I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this:
@Hubtech said:
sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host.
I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet.
-
@JaredBusch said:
I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this:
@Hubtech said:
sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host.
I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet.
Dude, I picked up some g5 dual quad xeon's for under 200 each. ebay bay bay
-
@Hubtech said:
@JaredBusch said:
I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this:
@Hubtech said:
sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host.
I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet.
Dude, I picked up some g5 dual quad xeon's for under 200 each. ebay bay bay
are you talking HP server? -
If you're considering running multiple VMs on your computer rather than running them on a server, you're going to need more IOPS. Consider using an SSD for a system drive and perhaps some tiered storage, such as Windows Storage Spaces, for your VM and data volume.
-
Thanks @alexntg
-
Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop.
The last SSD I used died a horrible death 2 months ago. It was less than a year old. Many times a day it would show 100% disk usage and my PC would come to a crawl. I am guessing that I just had a lemon.
-
We've been essentially all in SSD for years now. Haven't lost one yet. No issues at all. They've been amazing.
-
@technobabble said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop.
The last SSD I used died a horrible death 2 months ago. It was less than a year old. Many times a day it would show 100% disk usage and my PC would come to a crawl. I am guessing that I just had a lemon.
In that case, perhaps SSD system drive in RAID1
-
SSD are okay in RAID 5 too.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
SSD are okay in RAID 5 too.
RAID5 SSDs seem a bit overkill for a system drive.
-
@alexntg
I was also looking to make my "desktop" a VM as well running on Hyper-V. I wanted to be able to test out backing up VM's and other cool stuff I read on ML.
