Hello:

This is my first post here. I love the sight.

I have many years experience as a Solaris Admin. I am in the process of getting "Virtual".... LOVE IT!!!

I suspect there are many that use workstation supporting VM's at their home or office specifically for building new services, testing new applications, or patching/upgrades to existing services. I have had a little experience with this, but the machine in use is temporary.

I would guess that people have their favorites: Vmware, Xen, Fusion (Mac)... etc.

As a newbie to PC Hardware ( I was spoiled having a SUN rep. and company money), might you suggest machine requirements for running multiple virtual instances. I suspect the obvious is memory. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,
4DR

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

And the typical answer to your question will have to be:
How long is a piece of string?

Memory is indeed the biggest factor, or a very fast I/O subsystem.
But it all depends on what kind of payload your virtual guests will
have, really; I mean, to experiment with a most basic Linux-install
you get away with 256MB EASILY; throw in JBoss and/or a database
server, and you need 10 times more.



Cheers,
Tink

P.S.: As this is a pretty targeted question I'm moving
the thread over to our virtualisation forum.

Make sure you get a processor with hardware support for virtualization (VT on Intel ... there's something similar on AMD but the name is escaping me at the moment). Most recent processors from Intel or AMD support virtualization in the hardware, but stuff older than 2-3 years probably doesn't. I've not done much benchmarking, but from what little I've seen, the hardware extensions due noticeably speed up virtual machines.

"How long is a piece of string...???"... thanks for your patience.

Best,
4dr