Virtual Machine Experimenting

[turbodiesel]

Hey guys this is just a quick question.

I may be able to procure 2 servers, old intel sr2500 with dual xeon e5335 cpus. How many Virtual Machines do you think I can host with 16gb of ram.

Thanks in advance!

TD.

 

[spirit]

Depends what OS you want to run virtually and how much RAM you plan to/need to allocate to each really.

 

[voyagerfan99]

Those are pretty old but you'll still be able to run quite a few VM's. If you use VMware it handles system resources much better than Hyper-V would, so you could run as many as you needed really, as long as you have plenty of RAM.

 

[beers]

How many Virtual Machines do you think I can host with 16gb of ram.

Depends entirely on what you are using the vm for. You could host ~120 instances with 128 MiB of RAM each but that likely isn't applicable to your intended usage.

 

[turbodiesel]

Well I plan on using server 2008 as the host but do you think I could emulate 4 Windows 7 proffessional VMs with ease, these would most likely be rented out and used as game servers. How well would this work??

 

[voyagerfan99]

Not very well.

 

[Lax]

If you wanted to rent the boxes out as gaming servers your best bet may be to run them as a bare metal install. Splitting the box into multiple VM's would leave you with 4Gb for 4 VM's or 8Gb for 2 which MAY be enough for a dedicated host depending on the game it's running. As for VMware if you aren't running a vCenter along with your hosts ESXi would be free. If you wanted to run a vCenter server for clustering you would need to pay for VMware licensing which runs about $1,000 per license per CPU. Also depending on the board and your budget you can expand to 32 (maybe 64) Gb of RAM which would help immensely for running multiple VM's.

 

[beers]

these would most likely be rented out and used as game servers. How well would this work??

Hosting from your house is ill-advised.

 

[turbodiesel]

Hosting from my home is no problem because I have stable internet and I also dont need to worry about sound as I have servers in my garage which are inaudible.

If I upgrade to dual Xeon E5405's and to 32gb of ram, how could many instances of Windows 7 do you think I could run, would I be able to make it run smoother if I cut out Windows Server 2008 and Run ESXI?

Thanks in advance guys

 

[beers]

Hosting from my home is no problem because I have stable internet and I also dont need to worry about sound as I have servers in my garage which are inaudible.

You aren't ready for hosting if these are your only talking points.

What games do you plan on running?