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#11
I have made plans to get it and talked with MC already. 15 day return and gone for awhile so have o wait till home and running.
Hi there
The i7 might be overkill -- when dealing with VM's the main issues are the speed of the I/O devices (HDD's or better SSD's) and the amount of RAM you have in the system.
One doesn't generally use VM's for gaming, intensive calculations -- i.e highly "compute bound" processes or even editing multi-media (you can play video etc these days on a VM) so even an average graphics card would be OK -- often the onboard graphics (those built into the Mobo) is more than sufficient.
As for the VM's themselves - I run several versions of W10 x-64 PRO in 2 GB RAM for the VM with SSD's as well as XP, W7 and VISTA. They all run fine - my W10 machines have OFFICE 2010 or 2016 on them - not a problem and can even run photoshop decently.
The main host simply has a typical decent i5 processor and that's more than sufficient. The machine I'm using as Host has 32GB RAM - I'd say that 16GB RAM is a minimum but if you are only running 1 / 2 VM's concurrently say on a decent laptop 8GB RAM might do it.
If you run several VM's concurrently then they will "Eat RAM" for breakfast as not only is it the amount of RAM each VM has but the host if short will have to swap out VM's that are idle (no activity on them) to SSD / HDD and that takes time.
You have to decide what you want the Host to do or the VM's or both.
If you simply want to run a load of VM's concurrently then forget the i7 and spend the money you save on a cheaper processor, more SSD's and more RAM --with VM's you can never have "too much RAM".
Cheers
jimbo
Thank you Jimbo, I have made note of your very worthwhile advice and will keep an eye open for 16 RAM and a good 250-500 GB SSD.
I do no gaming and need only 1 guest.