[ale] OT: hardware forumn

[Greg Clifton]

I'm a hardware guy from way back but I don't have any experience with
VMWare. I assume that VMWare workstation is a para-virtualized environment.
If that is the case any current generation system should be more than
adequate. If this is just for educational purposes rather than production, I
wouldn't be too concerned with being on the compatibility list. Testing
costs lots of money, so very few systems get certified for any OS or
application but generally they work just fine. The gotchas are likely to be
video drivers and SATA controllers on new hardware.

As for specs, I would recommend a 500 Gig hard drive as a starting place,
unless you want or need something larger (NewEgg has a 3TB Hitachi hard
drive for like $119 this week) and I would suggest 6 to 8 GB of ram if you
intend to run several VM instances.

If you would prefer to have a BOM for a system or a quote built on Newegg
that you could just go order, I would be willing to help with that. Just let
me know your budget and any preferences you have such as Intel or AMD for
the CPU and hard drive brands and if you need an optical drive.

Best regards,
Greg Clifton

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 12:44 PM, John Heim <john at johnheim.net> wrote:

> I'm looking for a good place to ask questions about PC hardware.
>
> I want to build a PC to run linux & VMWare workstation. I need to learn
> something about Windows systems administration (don't laugh) and I thought
> I'd make a virtual PDC and see if I can get virtual Windows machines to
> join
> the domain. And since I'm blind, I thought I'd take the opportunity to
> brush
> up on my hardware assembly skills too.
>
> So I need help specing out a machine and matching mobo, CPU, and RAM on
> newegg. But I don't know where to ask about that.
>
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