I'm moving from a desktop to a laptop for my main computer. I use Workstation mainly for testing new servers and deployments like Exchange 2010 or the new Sharepoint, etc. I'm moving to a laptop because I'm commuting 2-3 hours a day by train and I want to spend that time working on my VMs. My question is, which hardware is most important for VM performance in Workstation? I don't need to run this at high performance, I just want to see, in your experience, which component makes the most difference so I can make a better decision here.
My main concern is the video card, I don't think I need much of a video card for VMs (won't be doing 3D anything here) but wanted to make sure. In my limited experience so far with running VMWare Workstation on laptops, hard drive performance seems to be the limiting factor so I'm getting an SSD. I currently have a Thinkpad W500 which I find a bit heavy and bulky but it performs well. I'm basically trying to decide between a new Thinkpad W510 w/7200rpm HD and just deal with the weight and bulkiness, or go with a T410s with an SSD which is much more portable. I think the portability will make me take the T410s with me more, and be able to work on it more by extension, but I don't want to get screwed if I need a decent video card to draw more than 1 simultaneous VM.
