Laptop for Lots of VMs

  • From: "Vishal Gupta" <vishal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:58:33 -0000

Hello List,
 
I currently have a home desktop, which I used for running my all VMs on VmWare 
Server. It good enough configuration to run 3-4 or more VMs at the same time. I 
have two internal hard disks on desktop. To get decent enough performance from 
VMs, I tend to run VMs on separate disk than the host disk.
 
But many times, I have left in situation where I don't have access to my small 
home virtual data centre. So I was looking for a powerful but lightweight 
laptop for this purpose. Ideally I would love to have VMs on separate disk. But 
laptop normally don't have enough room for 2 internal disks. And running VMs on 
external disk over USB2.0 (@480Mbps i.e. about 5 times slower than eSATA 
drives) will give a dreaded performance. USB3.0 (@5Gbps twice as fast as eSATA) 
would be good enough. But not many laptops support it yet.
 
Does anyone has any laptop recommendation for this purpose? I had MacBook Pro 
with 8GB + SSD hard disk in mind. It would cost about £2000 (inc VAT) in UK. 
Does anyone has any experiences to share of using MacBookPro to run multiple 
VMs? 
 
 
Desktop Configuration
CPU - Intel Core i7-920 (64bit) - single socket with 4 cores, 8 threads 
RAM - 6GB
Disk - Two internal 750GB each SATA-300 (@2400Mbps) drives , 1 external 2TB 
eSATA (@2400Mbps) drive.
Disk 1 - (internal) Host OS and other stuff
Disk 2 - (internal) Reserved for running only VMs
Disk 3 - (eSATA @2400Mbps ) Used
Disk 4 - USB 2.0 (@
 
Devices Speeds link - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths#Storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_i7#Processor_cores 
 
 
 
Regards,
Vishal Gupta
http://www.vishalgupta.com   

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