Laptop for VM Workstation - Advice please

[nelmangle]

All,

WE are looking to use our laptops to demo some of our current product offering. Currently we are using WinXP Prof 4Gb RAM Hosts with external USB HDDs with 2 x VMs (1.5Gb RAM, 50Gb VMDK) (win2K3 Server + Oracle).

Questions.

1 Would an external Firewire HDD or external eSATA HDD perform better that USB

2 How do we maintain the VMDKs. ie. housekeeping

3 What host OS would be best and would allow a greater amount of RAM to be utilised

All other suggestions welcomed.

TIA

Nels

[JFGS]

Take a look at Drobo Pro for storage of the VM's and using 2003 R2 x64 Server as the OS on the notebook. I have had great success with it.

[jcck20007]

eSATA is fast

when you create your VMDK, preallocate will provide you with better performances, as for the memory, it would depending on what else you are running on the XP. I would advise XP 64bit since you can fit in more memory as there is always overhead taken from the OS

[Scissor]

An external eSATA drive will make a huge difference. USB is slow.