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This is probably a pretty newbie question given the OP which seems to be heavily based on IT and moving all sorts of servers to VMs. Basically, I have Windows software that I'd like to test simultaneously on a bunch of different flavors of Windows (basically everything from XP up, 32 and 64 bit, so with Win8 we're up to 7 supported OS). The software itself is mildly CPU intensive, but not much on the RAM usage. No servers or server OS involved at all -- I just want one box running a whole bunch of single user Windows logins. My question is: What sort of hardware am I looking at if I want to run that many OSes at once and have them be generally responsive? I know you don't need to dedicate CPU cores to a VM, but if I spread 5 VMs plus a host OS over a quad-core processor, is it going to be horrible usability wise? Do I need to dedicate RAM to each VM or can I "over-provision" that too? (RAM seems cheap, though).
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Jun 13, 2012 04:52
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adorai posted:On desktop virtualization software, you cannot (typically) overprovision RAM but you can overprovision CPU cores. Depending on load, you can have significantly more cores provisioned than you have physical cores. We are at roughly 4 to 1 in our environment, which to be fair, is very much an enterprise shop. Thanks for the quick response and primer, that helps a lot. That said, our software involves a lot of wizards where you kick off a process and the machine churns away for 15+ minutes, so while our testers aren't supermen who will always be using 4+ virtual machines at once, it's not that crazy a test case for us to have them go and kick off a wizard on all 7 OS, then check back on the first to see if it's crashed, where it is in the log file, and so on. So I don't want to make the assumption that only 1 or 2 VMs will be using CPU and the rest idle. We certainly wouldn't performance test this way, so by "generally responsive" I just mean that I don't want it to be an hourglass-cursor type pain in the rear end for them to do stuff like Alt-Tab between the various VMs, capture screenshots and crop them in MS Paint, copy log files to a share on the company network, log bugs via a web browser on the host OS, etc. Basically what I'm reading from your statement is the higher the suspected simultaneous load, the less I should overprovision? Makes sense I suppose.
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Jun 13, 2012 06:43
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