Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

re: New Laptop Windows Vista SP1 Virtual Machine World Record

rob — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:36:08 GMT

Definitely some major geek-cred for that. Got me thinking now about seeing how many Ubuntu Servers I can get running on my rig since they have a much smaller footprint than a full blown GUI OS.

On a side note.. I run a pretty nice network at home.. Enterprise firewall, Domain, multiple web servers... every time I think I have a cool setup going Keith ups the ante... sigh..... Getting harder to keep up with the Combs'....

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

plitpro@microsoft.com — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:06:43 GMT

On http://blogs.technet.com/3067477.aspx I'm describing 32 Windows Server virtual machines running on my laptop (T60p, 4GB RAM, Vista 32bit) Running 33rd is impossible due to VirtualPC limitations... ;)

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

gee — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:49:03 GMT

you can run 500+ dos vm if you want, but does that make sense?

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Keith Combs — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:10:57 GMT

Gee, no, 500 DOS VMs are uninteresting.

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

larry — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:12:21 GMT

how many vista can you run at the same time :)

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

rob — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:53:46 GMT

DOS... no, but a whole bunch of Ubuntu servers running a load-balancing cluster would be a fun exercise. Pointless in terms of usefullness, but we're talking geek-cred here... :-)

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Keith Combs — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:43:35 GMT

Ubuntu servers? Hardly exciting either.

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

lot — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:50:03 GMT

I find this only a tad fascinating. I was quick to notice all of them are at idle, so it still doesn't do any good having them all loaded up sitting at idle. I imagine as one starts to really do some work, the laptop will most likely sieze up.

I never could really grasp the notion of running such instances on one machine, let alone running them as a load balancer, does no good if the host dies.

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Keith Combs — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:05:11 GMT

Did you read the article? This is primarily about pointing out there's 4GB more of available memory to Santa Rosa and higher latops now (total of 8GB). This means you can do more with virtulization. It might mean better performance for an existing scenario. It might mean you can now run another VM or two that really enables a scenario you could not run before.

Loading up a bunch of VMs means nothing other than to show the memory allocations are working. Period. Well, maybe bragging rights for a day, but little else. Geek stuff.

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Chad Ohman — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:53:51 GMT

Hi Keith,

In my former life, I worked at Microsoft as a "Technologist" building VM's for all Product lines to post to MCT download center prior to Microsoft's purchase of Connectix in 03 and after....

I am currently running a Cleva D900 Quadcore with 3-internal SATA drives and Windows 2008 Server Hyper-V.

However, the form factor is large and bulky... I like your setup. If you'd have a moment, i'd love to chat with you about your findings and experience.

Are you using eSata drives externally?

or is does the T61p accomodate a 2nd drive?

Also - what was the total cost of your setup? I see that Kingston is shipping 4gb modules on the 11th of June for $500.00/ea ... pretty hefty price... but doable if I purchase the laptop right.

Chad -

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Keith Combs — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:54:53 GMT

Chad,

As indicated on the original post, I was using two internal 2.5" SATA drives and an external USB attached Maxtor drive. Therefore, yes the ThinkPad T61p accomodates a second drive. You can pull the cd/dvd drive and insert a Multibay hard drive adaptor (caddy) with the second 2.5" SATA drive.

You can buy a loaded T61p with 4GB of RAM for around $1500 USD on sale. They are on sale right now. Who knows what 8GB of memory is going to cost. The starting price is from $900-1000 and corporate discounts will be lower. I know ours will be lower. When those 4GB sticks become plentiful, if history is any indicator, the price will drop big time. Look at the 2GB stick prices. When they first came out, they were $980 per stick. Now they are around $50.

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Jordan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:00:30 GMT

Nice!

My personal toshiba satellite just got the LCD smashed in on it, so im thinking of replacing it with a Thinkpad.

Although it certainly wont be a T61p w/ 8 GB of RAM. :(

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

dovella — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:10:08 GMT

Keith Combs

You re GREAT!!!!!!!

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Dugie — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:31:48 GMT

You scare me Keith; in the nicest possible way =)

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Tonko Papic — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:54:55 GMT

when an aplication virtualize an OS all the files and resources are duplicated, triplicated, etc... it could be an interesting idea to develope a efficient system manager (or a machine manager), so if the same file is loaded on memory in diferent virtual machines, the system detect this file and load it only once in physical memory and manage the resource to be called from the virtual machine that needs it.

User files and os files

re: Running A Bunch Of Vista SP1 VMs on Hyper-V With A Single Laptop

Ben Pottinger — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:27:34 GMT

RE: Tonko Papic

The feature your describing Tonko is Memory page sharing and has been in use by ESX for a number of years.