VMWare Workstation on a Dell Laptop PC

Hi CLR3934,

The # of Windows-based VMs you can set up without experience perf issues depends on your VM configuration and the applications that you'll be running. There is memory & CPU overhead associated with VMware. How many VMs are you looking at running? How many vCPUs & how much memory are you going to associate with each VM? Plus, what will the IO profile be ... lots of IOps? All of these factor will determine your mileage with the # of VMs.

In my experience, for max performance, you'll want to not over-commit any of your compute & memory resources (exact commitment of resources inclusive of hypervisor & VMs overhead tend to produce the best perf #s). In addition, you'll want optimize your memory subsystem in terms of capacity & bandwidth and provide near 1:1 # of cores to # of VM vCPUs. Next, your disk & network IO profiles will factor into your overall perf experience.

At this time, Dell has only conducted VMware VMmark performance testing on PowerEdge servers. I'm not aware of any performance benchmark of VMware on Dell laptops.

P.S. I've seen your note & will send you an email to further discuss.

Regards,

KongY@Dell

I haven't done any benchmark testing, but I don't recommend running too many VM's on laptop hardware (Unless it is a Precision M with a RAID setup). That is unless the VM's are going to be WinXP, Linux or an older version of Windows Server. The issue I ran into wasn't with CPU and memory but with disk I/O. I single Win 7 x64 VM killed the disk I/O on the system. If you have to do something like that, I recommend getting an eSATA drive and having the VM's run off of that. That should save your system and allow you to get things working on a laptop. For reference, I was using an E6410 with a single HDD to run VMWare Workstation and building a Win7 x64 OS....it was painful. Moving to an external drive made things function much better (eSATA NOT USB).