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ESX on a Laptop

I'd watched VMWare since before it was VMWare. It never quite made financial sense. Recently attended a mini-seminar hosted by Dell about backups. It included and unexptected virtualization and VMWare. I was intrigued by ESX. It was free, so I decided to download ESX and VMWare Server to try. Because I don't need to clean off any disks first, I put VMWare Server on a couple machines. I was quite surprised it worked, with no funny stuff. The VMs didn't act any different that the host OS. The I realized I could copy the VMs around too. I downloaded a FreeBSD VM from the web, and it worked fine. That got me here.

I'm investigating this furthur, and actually using it in some commercial applications for our own company, and our customers. Our laptops are 9400s. They are identical except one has a T2500 processor, and the other T7200. They both are the same speed, and they both should have VT. The advantage the T7200 has it EMT64 support. However, they are both limited to 4 gigs or RAM anyway. They both have 7200 RPM 320 GIG SATAs. I'd like to put Winddows XP, Windows Vista, 2003 Server, Netware, FreeBSD, and SUSE server on them. Today, they use XP for their OS. The end game for the laptops is to be able to reference them when supporting people over the phone by having a copy available. E.G. All but XP will be demo.

We did install VMWare Server on them. They worked great. The performance difference of being a VM was not noticable. Questions:

1. Today they have XP on them. In this situation, the XP would be a VM rather than the host OS. Will the XP perform pretty much as good as before assuming that it is the only VM running?

2. Any gotchas or oprtimizations that should be handled during install?

Thanks!

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Kahonu84
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Aloha - I would see lack of NIC's being a possible bottleneck.

Bill

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azn2kew
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If you're using for demo or testing environment, loading ESX on a supported hardware wouldn't be a problems now they released quad cores laptops with 8GB+ RAM and you can work with that pretty well. If its for production, I suggest you deploy a server base hardware like Dell PE2950 or IBM x3650 that would do just great.

If you're looking for hosting low end guest machines, than you can always use VMware Workstation 6.5 or VMware Server 2.0 for free but its not "bare metal" installation and performance and stability is not guarantee but good enough for other purpose. If you want to use ESX and test how things work, you can always install windows XP on your laptop and load VMware Workstation 6.5 on it and create ESX VMs for testing. Xtravirt.com has a great guide for this purpose.

Again, if you're looking to run ESX on a laptop for production, I wouldn't recommend but its doable if you have a high end laptop with supported hardware.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Stefan Nguyen VMware vExpert 2009 iGeek Systems Inc. VMware vExpert, VCP 3 & 4, VSP, VTSP, CCA, CCEA, CCNA, MCSA, EMCSE, EMCISA
Texiwill
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Hello,

ESX/ESXi will not run on a laptop yet. Not the bare metal but it can run within a VM within VMware Workstation. This is only for demo purposes and perhaps development. I suggest sticking with VMware Server/Workstation on laptops for now.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
Kahonu84
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Aloha - I would see lack of NIC's being a possible bottleneck.

Bill

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IT_Architect
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Thanks all. I did not understand the scoring system you had. I just worked down and said helpful until I got to the end and saw correct answer. I'll know better next time.

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