Virtualization

[Hijazs]

Hello People

I am planning to buy a Laptop for virtualization purpose. I was thinking on whether buying a laptop which is a quad core i7 or a dual core i7.

Which do you think will have better performance the older Quad Core (2nd or 3rd Gen) ones or the latest 4th Gen Dual Core i7?

Currently I am looking at the 4500u and hows the performance of that processor for my purpose. Hows that processor?.

And what do you say about INTEL VT-D. Do i really need it in my CPU?

Please help me guyz
Thank You

 

[dark zero]

Mmm.. The i7 4500u is as fast as a Pentium G3220 with HT. So Nope.

Go.And buy any MQ or HQ chip based laptop.

 

[Hijazs]

What about the other dualcore based ones like the 5500u?

So is it okay if get a something like the 2670qm because it is only 2nd Gen wont there it be any problem?

Should i or should i not give priority to the generation of the processors?

 

[Ratman6161]

Depends on what you are doing, but its unlikely it will be the CPU that's your bottleneck in a laptop. More than likely it will be storage.

 

[Hijazs]

mostly ill be using it for vmware, virtualbox and sort of virtualization software... So what fo u recomend newer dual core ones or older quad core ones like the 2670qm

 

[justanotherboy]

It depends on what you would be running in your VMs, usually if you run a lot of VMs concurrently your main issue will be RAM. You can run out of RAM very quickly. If you run one VM at a time, the problem would be storage.

It will be better to know what you would be running in the VMs to really know what is the best option for you.

 

[Hijazs]

Mostly i will be using windows Server Versions and few windows Client versions. However this is not for any business purpose it is purely for educational purpose since I am a student.
So i need smooth performance as well as battery life and less heat.

So which will suite me?

 

[asendra]

If you care about battery and heat don't use virtual box. At least on Macs, the difference in battery between virtualbox and parallels/vmware is measured in hours.

 

[itsmydamnation]

you will be bottlenecked by memory every time, get the one within your budget with the most memory.

*i used vmware everyday on a 4500U

 

[Yuriman]

I'd take the newer dual core (all else being equal) for the performance/watt improvements in Intel's newer platforms. I might use older chips in desktops, but it's a hard sell to me in mobile.

 

[justanotherboy]

If you are not going to do development in the VMs, seems your main issue will be the RAM. Are you planning to run several of these machines at once? I don't know the Windows RAM/HDD requirements these days, but I bet they require at least 1 GB of RAM.

And regarding VT-d, that is used to pass hardware directly to the VM and removing it from your machine. That means if you pass the Ethernet card to your VM, the VM will use the hardware directly and will be removed from the host. This feature requires support from the CPU, motherboard, BIOS and software. But it seems that you will install a type-2 hypervisor, so I don't think you'll need this feature.

I use an ULV core i5 ivy bridge (dual core) for 3 Linux VMs and it work just fine, I'm using KVM on Linux but as I told you, Windows VMs would require a lot more of RAM than Linux VMs.

 

[Hijazs]

So guys what if I am getting the older quad core cheaper than the newer dualcore ones what would you recomend and both the machines have 8GB of RAM.

And What if I get the 4500u and increase the amount of ram when necessary in a later period of time.

If You say RAM is the Issue then how about a Core i3 5th Gen with 16GB of RAM?

Notice - I am a student and do not work in a real environment i just need to emulate the real process for practicing the Windows Server 2012.

 

[justanotherboy]

If you go to the Windows 2012 requirements they list as follow:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303418.aspx

CPU: 1 X 1.4GHz
RAM: 512 MB
HDD: 32 GB

Note this are the minimum!

So if you have 4 VMs running concurrently, they would use 4 CPUs of 1.4 GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 128 GB of HDD; plus your machine's requirements. And these would be the minimum. Consider the CPU time can be shared and usually not all the VMs use 100% of CPU all the time, but RAM and HDD can't be shared.

After seeing the requirements I don't think a laptop is a good candidate to run several VMs.

I would really recommend to test for yourself installing a VM and see how it works with your current hardware.