[ale] OT: hardware forumn

[Damon Chesser]

IIRC Workstation is in fact a full-virtualization.  You recompile (or compile) modules that are inserted into the kernel to allow for the hypervisor.  This is slick and also provides for tons of issues when you upgrade your kernel or some other essential lib and the changes will not work with the Workstation.  The web is full of "help" messages when this happens.

Damon Chesser
dchesser at acsi2000.com
damon at damtek.com

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Greg Clifton
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 1:12 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: hardware forumn

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<mailto: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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