Best config for this hardware?

[CTSTech]

Running ESXi 5 on a Dell PowerEdge T610 with 1 Quad-core CPU w/ hyperthreading and 8 GB of Ram.  There will only be 1 VM running SBS 2008.

For best performance of this 1 VM, how much should I allocate to:

Ram?

vCPU cores?

Anything else?

[AndreTheGiant]

It depends on your user number and other VM that you plan to use.

2 (or 4) vCPU are enough.

About the RAM is really small... If this is the only VM you can give 6 GB (2 are used by ESXi)

[jlong]

Why virtualize just 1 guest?

[CTSTech]

This was a P2V back to the same hardware. There will be no other VMs installed for now.

How much Ram should I allocate? There is some overhead right?

Should I give it all 4 CPUs?

[daspug201110141]

Leave 2GB of RAM for the host, and I'd say at least one CPU.

The rest can be used for the SBS guest OS.

I would say that depending on just how large this SBS environment is, you may struggle with 6GB of RAM.

[CTSTech]

Yeah, they have been living with the slow Server for a while - it wasn't setup right to begin with for the resources that SBS needs.  It has SATA drives as well :smileyangry:

So give 6 GB of Ram to the VM...

And 3 vCPUs?  There are 8 available with the Hyper-threading.

[daspug201110141]

I’d run with 6 vCPU’s then if you have Hyper Threading enabled and active… just leave a pCPU for the host and you’ll shouldn’t have any issues, though isn’t there a CPU limit for SBS (4 I think) so you may have to set it up as 3 CPU’s with 2 Cores each if it’s ESXi5 to get the most out of it…

Dan

~~~

[CTSTech]

Daniel Hayward wrote:

you may have to set it up as 3 CPU’s with 2 Cores each if it’s ESXi5 to get the most out of it…

So performance is different if I choose 2 vSockets & 2 vCores, vs choosing 1 vSocket with 4 vCores?

[AndreTheGiant]

No... does not change.