Virtualization: The Practical Implementation - I

I'm helping my friend Nitin at his firm Star4ce Technologies put up a virtualization server as their in-house development environment. To begin with we went ahead and ordered some hardware from newegg.

Here is a brief on the hardware we've picked;

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor
• ASUS P5K-E LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
• (5) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
• (2) CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) SDRAM Dual Channel
• LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe SATA
• Antec 850W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
• Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
• ZOTAC GeForce 7300GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16
• Logitech USB + PS/2 Cordless Standard Desktop EX110 Mouse Included

Now the bill fits to around $1,500.00 as of the day this article was written. Hopefully by next week we shall receive the components and we shall go ahead and assemble the system.

A few after thoughts about the hardware choices

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300
45nm consumes less power compared to predecessors and can be over clocked to 3.2GHz.

ASUS P5K-E
It's not a high end server, but can be used for a low end server. We did see a few other motherboards but opted for this, as they had SLI and were more geared towards being gaming PC's.

Why no Server Motherboards
This is an interesting find we dug into, we decided to hit the server motherboards for the system, as they supported 32GB of RAM quite easily as compared to the 8GB max of the above mentioned. The price was not that different approx $150.00 higher (with dual processors -physical) but it had FB-RAM which took the toll on the price of the system. 4GB on FB-RAM goes to approx $250.00 to $550.00 for 8GB. Yes now that's a whopping high number we are talking about.

So we are back to reality with a lower end system (recall the first article) it was aimed towards start-ups and low budget development teams.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS
32MB cache, and I trust Seagate. 5 pieces: 1- OS and 4- RAID 01

CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
Nice & reliable.

ZOTAC GeForce 7300GT 256MB
There was no onboard video, this was the lowest and best

So we wait and watch for the parts to arrive. I'll be posting in intermittently the progress, issues & accomplishments along the way.

UPDATE: The shipping was quick, the parts should be arriving today afternoon.