I'm using a Sony Z (which you can't get anymore unfortunately) However a lot of the corporate models will have:
a) Main drive bay b) Option to put a second drive in the optical bay c) Powered eSATA (put another SSD in a PeSATA case) I'd avoid having a regular mechanical drive at all if you can avoid it (unless you really need bulk storage of installation media etc.) I do keep a 750GB 2.5" drive around for that, but I put my most commonly used installation ISOs on a 32Gb SD card. I have 256GB internal SSD, plus 2 x 240GB SSDs for the VMs. Most VMs seem to be around 10-20GB, so that gives you the ability to store a large number. Cheers Ken From: Jon Harris [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 17 May 2011 6:31 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Recommendations - Laptop for Virtualization I am in the middle of doing this as well and went with a Dell E-6520 maxed out on RAM, CPU, and video. It will come in about $2k US. I will also be getting an e-SATA drive setup (most likely a build my own as it will allow me to replace the drive later) to put all the VM's and Virtual manager server and direct boot from the e-SATA. If you have the extra money I would look at a Dell Precision laptop. You can get a lot more RAM but the cost of the base machine is much higher. Jon On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Mark Smith <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi All, I need to purchase a laptop to run a virtualized test environment on. So it will need a CPU that supports VT of course. I'm thinking quad core would be best to handle the VM load. I'd like to have the option of running an SSD for the primary drive and a large SATA drive for storage. I'm having a hard time finding which laptops support 2 hard drives. It would be nice if it had mobile broadband (WWAN) support, so I could just pop a SIM card in it - I keep breaking my dongle ;) but I doubt I'll find a high powered laptop with that option. Any recommendations, opinions would be great. Thanks, Mark ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
