Disk and RAM tend to be the two big resource contention areas, along at times with CPU (or number of cpu's) You need FAST disks, and it's good to spread the VM's across a few differnt disks if you can affort it. RAM ends up being very critical to what you can run at any one time, and the problem with a lot of workstation motherboards is they just won't let you mount enough ram sticks..
I recommend something like a small 2U rackmount server that will allow you to slot like 6 drives into the front of it. something like 16 DIMM's worth of RAM slots, and a pair of 4 core (or better) xeon processors Very important is the ability to support boatload of ram.. (depends on how many virtual machines you want to run at once.) Put drives into mirrors, not raid5, for best performance. Filler er half full of ram for now and leave room to add more when you find you need it. If you are talking about a seriously good sized collection of both test servers, and also clients (different OS's browsers etc) then at least 16G of ram to start, 24G or more would be better. trust me. I've got a system of that sort, started with 8G and twin 500g drives, then upgraded the ram to 24G and added two 1Tb drives.. both the drives are in mirror sets. I maintain a stable of about 40+ VM's for test systems, about 20 or so of which I'll have 'on' at any given time. About 1/3 are 'server' (various combinations of OS, 32 or 64 bit, and versions of SQL server etc., another 1/3 are various supported client plaforms (xp, vista, win7, etc) in different configs of 32 or 64 bit, different browser versions, etc. The other 1/3 are configs that are very specific to things like payroll programs we integrate with etc.. and represent a fair bit of work to get setup and working, and while I might need them for testing only every month or three, it's nice to be able to just spin up the system, let it patch, and be ready to test in a known environment. I run all that from a single 2U rackmount DELL server (2570?) that runs server2008x64 w/ Hyper-V I keep the drives on the test systems fairly small (usually 40G dynamic works fine), and also find I can often get by with allocating 500Meg of ram to most clients and smaller servers, upwards of 1-2G if doing 2008x64 vm's Since there's nothing else running on it, I find I can get by on somethng like a svr2003+sql2005 'server' with 500MB of Ram. Might need more if the app was really intense on the SQL side, but that's not the case so I don't need a huge sql cache. --Chuck On Oct 22, 1:18 am, Željko Filipin <zeljko.fili...@wa-research.ch> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Alan Ark <ar...@compli.com> wrote: > > I was thinking of a quad-core desktop with memory maxed out, and a > > somewhat speedy disk drive. > > Sounds good to me. I have heard that slow disk affects performance of VMs > the most. Some even say you should have a separate disk for VM(s) and a > separate for host OS. A lot of RAM is always a good thing (especially if you > plan to run several VMs at the same time), and fast CPU can not hurt. I run > my tests on MacBook Pro and Mac Mini (I can provide more details if you are > interested). > > Željko -- Before posting, please read http://watir.com/support. In short: search before you ask, be nice. watir-general@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general watir-general+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
