Challenge - 12 Simultaneous VM's on a single PC/Laptop

[VMfan]

Hello everybody,

Any help that people could offer would be greatly appreciated. When it comes to building them I'm a total newbie. A pre-built system would be incredible but with some help I'm sure I could learn to put it together.

My requirements are actually relatively lightweight, so no massive photoshop or video editing or anything like that. Here's what I'm thinking:

• 
  ■ I'd like to run around 12 virtual machines running windows 10 simultaneously. Yeah.
  ■ The VM's will all have one or two webpages running at the same time. Nothing too crazy. The equivalent of a mediocre flash game at maximum. Sorry for the comparison it's the best I can compare it too.
  ■ They will all run VPN's (hence the need for W10 and not linux). I'd like to maintain the connection for as long as possible so they keep the same IP. Buying static IP's aren't an option.
  ■ Screen resolution can be pretty small something like 1024 x 768 is fine.
  ■ [Optional] Being able to see all the VM's would be advantageous, therefore a setup with capability for either one very large monitor or a few smaller (but still large) monitors would be great.
  ■ It's very unlikely but if we can give a laptop build as well then that'd be amazing. I'll use this for work so mobility is nice.
  ■ Budget - There's no sense in spending more than required so let's not be silly and spend money we don't need to!!!

Here's what I understand so far:

• 
  ■ RAM - To run lots of VM's I need lots of RAM. 2-4GB each when running Windows 10
  ■ Processor - Other than being good I'm not sure. I believe the processor is used for the graphics on the VM's as well?
  ■ Storage - SSD's, I need speed at doing simple web-browsing. Submitting orders etc. I understand I need to store around 32GB for each VM OS with space to operate. As I want to run multiple VM's at the same time I'm thinking multiple SSD's to share the load? It's possible I'll want to store other VM's on the system even if they aren't being run at the same time.
  ■ Graphics - Other than for the potential of future montiors I believe this is not important as VM graphics are processed by the host CPU.
  ■ Virtual machine - I'm using Virtual Box, it's free, I've been able to install Windows 10 without registering the copies. It's easy to clone from my master copy.

That's pretty much it! Simple on one hand but complex on the other!

Any help that you guys can give would be amazing. Thanks so much.

 

[eatmypie]

You really don't need that much memory per vm for windows 7,8, or 10. All of my windows VM's run at 1 gig if there isn't some big program that I would be running on them requiring more. So for 12 VM's you can get away with 16 gigs, but getting a 24-32gig laptop would be better. Most of the laptop chipsets will allow for more ram than what the manufacture says. Like my old old laptop was a t420 and it had 16 gigs working and it was listed as being able to take only 8 on their website. For the processor, I've found you can run 4 VM's per physical core on laptops on desktops. and two per hyperthreaded core. So an I'7 non U would be best. Most higher end laptops I've noticed that are of decent size will let you install 2 hard drives or ssd's. But I personally just have a single 480gig in my laptop that I travel with. Then I use two usb 3.0 external drives with 960GB enterprise grade SSD's.

But really not to many of us who work with a lot of vm's everyday use a laptop as our primary workstation, we mostly use our desktops. then we get a mid ranged i'7 laptop with like 8-16gigs of ram as our traveling workstation. If you have that option you will be a lot happier.

 

[VMfan]

Wow, great response, thank you.

So I've just tried knocking the ram allowance down to 1GB from 2GB and it's running too slowly even with 2 running. So I'm thinking that maybe the hard drive is the bottleneck here?

I have 4 x USB 3.0 ports, can I use any of these for external hard drive usage like you say? Would that be faster than the hard drive I have running now? If I can add a few mods to my current laptop then great, but i'm expecting to have to buy a new system. Desktop would be fine too 🙂

This is through my laptop which has these specs:
CPU - i7-3630QM @ 2.4 GHz,
RAM - 8 GB Ram (not sure what type)
Graphics - nVidia GT650M
windows 8.1 64-bit,
Hard-drive - Samsung HN-M750MBB 750 GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0 Gb-s

You really don't need that much memory per vm for windows 7,8, or 10. All of my windows VM's run at 1 gig if there isn't some big program that I would be running on them requiring more. So for 12 VM's you can get away with 16 gigs, but getting a 24-32gig laptop would be better. Most of the laptop chipsets will allow for more ram than what the manufacture says. Like my old old laptop was a t420 and it had 16 gigs working and it was listed as being able to take only 8 on their website. For the processor, I've found you can run 4 VM's per physical core on laptops on desktops. and two per hyperthreaded core. So an I'7 non U would be best. Most higher end laptops I've noticed that are of decent size will let you install 2 hard drives or ssd's. But I personally just have a single 480gig in my laptop that I travel with. Then I use two usb 3.0 external drives with 960GB enterprise grade SSD's.

But really not to many of us who work with a lot of vm's everyday use a laptop as our primary workstation, we mostly use our desktops. then we get a mid ranged i'7 laptop with like 8-16gigs of ram as our traveling workstation. If you have that option you will be a lot happier.

 

[eatmypie]

Yeah I normally run mine just fine with one but you can try like 1.25 or 1.5. But a 5400rpm hard drive is probably your issue right now. 7200rpm drives at least the newer ones are good enough for vm's, but if you use an SSD it would be much faster. VM's also benefit a lot from faster memory as well. So what I would do is see what the highest speed of memory you can get going on your laptop is, and then see how much it can take. But a large capacity SSD would also be a huge help. The problem using SSd's with USB's before was that it couldn't take advantages of things like trim etc. But now with the updates they can. I mean I would put maybe $200 into your laptop and get a 480gb SSD and some good ram, then I would recommend building like a Xeon computer with about 16-32gigs of ram, and a r9 380 or something like that.

 

[VMfan]

I might make a new post for it, but could I be very cheeky and ask you to have a shot at doing an online build for a PC in Australia? I have no idea about motherboards, raid, etc etc so I'm lost before I start.

Do you think I could get the 12 VM's running on a $1000 (AUD) desktop? Could I make it even cheaper?! I can add monitors later 🙂 This is all I'd use the computer for so no worries about making it gaming compatible etc.

Thanks for any help!

 

[anarchatheistic]

Just out of curiousity.. Why was it that your need to be connected through a VPN lead to you crossing out linux as an option? I believe most linux kernels are familiar with VPN connections, hell I even heard there's a couple of SERVERS out there running linux now lol.. (Yes I know they basically all do it's a joke)