Spec'ing a new workstation rig for my office
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 yeah, I have an HP Elite i7 with 8 gb of ram. I dont run vms, that's what my server is for. and i dont need all that horsepower, neither do you  but if you want it, buy it. but if you want it, buy it.
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 I run on an ancient Phenom II X3 with 4GB and it is great for me. A little more power wouldn't be bad, but it boots in like six seconds and works really well. 
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 W7 VM for data recovery. W7, Vista and XP VMs, also need XP to recover my Office Accounting 2007 data VM to setup and check out Mint. VM for a Virtual Lab for testing Server 2012r2 (Can you run VMs inside VMs with their own Vnetwork?) 
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 @technobabble said: VM for a Virtual Lab for testing Server 2012r2 (Can you run VMs inside VMs with their own Vnetwork?) yes but you really start hurting performance. 
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 @scottalanmiller Noted! 
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 sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host. 
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 I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this: @Hubtech said: sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host. I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet. 
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 @JaredBusch said: I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this: @Hubtech said: sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host. I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet. Dude, I picked up some g5 dual quad xeon's for under 200 each. ebay bay bay 
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 @Hubtech said: @JaredBusch said: I recently dropped a SSD in my desktop and it now flies right along. I would go with this: @Hubtech said: sounds like you should just get a workstation (vanilla) and a esxi host. I am still trying to get some gear for my office to have for testing. but no money for it and no used gear has fell in my lap yet. Dude, I picked up some g5 dual quad xeon's for under 200 each. ebay bay bay 
 are you talking HP server?
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 If you're considering running multiple VMs on your computer rather than running them on a server, you're going to need more IOPS. Consider using an SSD for a system drive and perhaps some tiered storage, such as Windows Storage Spaces, for your VM and data volume. 
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 Thanks @alexntg 
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 Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop. 
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 @scottalanmiller said: Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop. The last SSD I used died a horrible death 2 months ago. It was less than a year old. Many times a day it would show 100% disk usage and my PC would come to a crawl. I am guessing that I just had a lemon. 
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 We've been essentially all in SSD for years now. Haven't lost one yet. No issues at all. They've been amazing. 
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 @technobabble said: @scottalanmiller said: Use SSD no matter what. Best investment for a desktop. The last SSD I used died a horrible death 2 months ago. It was less than a year old. Many times a day it would show 100% disk usage and my PC would come to a crawl. I am guessing that I just had a lemon. In that case, perhaps SSD system drive in RAID1 
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 SSD are okay in RAID 5 too. 
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 @scottalanmiller said: SSD are okay in RAID 5 too. RAID5 SSDs seem a bit overkill for a system drive. 
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 @alexntg 
 I was also looking to make my "desktop" a VM as well running on Hyper-V. I wanted to be able to test out backing up VM's and other cool stuff I read on ML.
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 In that case, someone's prior suggestion of a basic workstation and an ESXi host would be the way to go. Don't use Hyper-V. 
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 @alexntg said: @scottalanmiller said: SSD are okay in RAID 5 too. RAID5 SSDs seem a bit overkill for a system drive. So does RAID 1  



