How many virtual machine can I cram into one host with this configuration?

[myxomop]

Hi. I have an i7 2.67GHz with 12GB RAM, and 2 HDDs, running 64-bit Win 7

Currently I have 4 virtual machines running, 2 on each HHD, all of them Win XP with 1536 Mb RAM and 50Gb HDD allocated for each of them. Also, I have software running on host OS, so I have to spare some resources for that.

Currently, performance is rather poor. Virtual machines are sluggish and not very responsive.

My questions are as follows:

- What can I comfortably do with this configuration? How many virtual machines can I host and with what stats, to get a good performance? Would adding extra HDDs help a lot? If yes, which kind?

- If I were to purchase a new host machine, or to upgrade an existing one, what would you recommend? And in general, with idea host configuration (again, which one is that?), how many virtual machines can be running at the same time without much drop in performance?

Thanks!

[abhilashhb]

Always the performance is decided by the underlying hardware. You have 12GB RAM that is sufficient to run the 4 VM's that you mentioned. 1536*4=6144 Which is 6GB of RAM. And even if you keep aside 4GB of RAM for you Host OS you still have 2GB left for VM's.

What kind of issue are you facing? Graphic performance? Have you installed VMware tools on all the VM's? How many vCPU's have you allocated for each machine? Have you tried increasing the resources for one or more machines and see if they get any better?

[weinstein5]

Also to add using a hosted hypervisor like VMware will support less virtual machines than a bare metal hypervisor like ESXi as it will to contend with the hosting OS -

[abhilashhb]

Agreed. But for 4 VM's i think a Workstation would be more than enough. If there are plans of having more machines and better performance and avoid dependency on Host OS its better to install ESXi.

[myxomop]

I don't care for graphic performance. I run some custom made software on this machines, and they use lots of CPU and memory.

1 processor and 1 core allocated for each virtual machine.

Please elaborate more regarding ESXi. Ideally i'd like to run up to 8 VMs on a single host. What hardware/software upgrades should I do to achieve that?

Thanks!

[OscarDavey]

Hello,

Look at the task manager of your Host OS to determine,

which resource is low in your hardware(CPU, RAM, HDD).

If you will add HDD, just add SSD to have more performance.

Hope will help.

Yours, Oscar