Re: linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:05:00 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: On 10/19/2011 11:28 AM, Camaleón wrote: On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:37 +1000, yudi v wrote: Building a new PC, will be used for coding mostly, running 2-3 VMs simultaneously. Then -although you have not say any specific number- add more ram (8 up to 24 GiB is a good starting point) ;-P 8-24GB? For a development box running 2-3 VMs? That's overkill. Let me explain. (...) Okay, Stan... I agree -to some extent- with your explanation, but didn't you notice the emoticon I put at the end of the paragraph? (Tip: ;-P) I wanted to put emphasis in memory because of the nature of the computer that will be used to run virtual machines and for coding (which lead me to think also in the needing of compiling stuff). I agree that a 24 GiB box can be overkill now, but in about 5 years it can become a common amount of ram on standard (non specific purpose) systems. At a previous $day_job a few years back we were running a mix of 13 SLES 9/10, W2K3, and Sarge VM guests across two dual CPU dual core Opteron 2GHz IBM blades (4 cores/blade) with VMware ESX3. Each blade had only 8GB RAM. Additionally, were were running the 32 bit VMware kernel with PAE as the native 64bit kernel wasn't available yet. All the VMs were 32bit as well. (...) That were high-end machines running on a virtaulization system which does a very good management of the host resources, which is focused to the enterprise market and runs over no OS layer but directly on a bare-system. Besides, you know that VMWare provides a detailed hardware KB where lists all of the supported/well tested hardware where it can be run and you know that you are not going to get the same level of performance running VMware ESX3 over IBM blade systems with Opterons as with a 150$ motherboard. That said, I use VirtualBox on my notebook (a windows xp based host with one centrino core and 4 GiB of ram) and can only launch a virtual machine at a time (debian testing and debian stable are the guests with ~1 GiB of ram for each). Launching two VMs will, of course, decrease noticiably the host performance and makes one of the VMs to pause. I can reduce the memory available to the guests but then GNOME becomes a bit slow. With or without using KSM (http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt), Yudi should be able get by easily with 4GB of RAM. As memory is so cheap these days he may as well get 8GB. Anything over that is money wasted, no matter how little, on simply having more buffer cache. If we were runing 13 VMs in 8GB, surely he can run 3 in 4GB. Of course, the election of the VM system and the applications which are going to be hosted on it do matter a lot, but more details are needed before making further recommendations on this. Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.10.20.13.34...@gmail.com
linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
Hi all, Building a new PC, will be used for coding mostly, running 2-3 VMs simultaneously. Debian Linux will be the host OS. I need some suggestions on Motherboards. Which manufacturer has good linux support? Will use Intel on board graphics. No gaming. will use couple of HD monitors. Thats about it. Looking at getting Z68 chipset board. There is a lot of choice. I heard that Intel has good linux driver support, most of the Mobo OEMs use Realtek NICs, are they fine or should I avoid them? -- Kind regards, Yudi
Re: linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:37 +1000, yudi v wrote: Building a new PC, will be used for coding mostly, running 2-3 VMs simultaneously. Then -although you have not say any specific number- add more ram (8 up to 24 GiB is a good starting point) ;-P Debian Linux will be the host OS. I need some suggestions on Motherboards. Which manufacturer has good linux support? Nowadays is very hard to tell. My advice is that you choose a set of 5 motherboards that you like and come back here with the results. Will use Intel on board graphics. No gaming. will use couple of HD monitors. Thats about it. Looking at getting Z68 chipset board. There is a lot of choice. While I'm an Intel user, have you also considered AMD? You will get better graphics performance for an overall lower price. Also, a word of caution: Z68 chipset seems very new and Linux tend to give less problems with not-that-new hardware. I heard that Intel has good linux driver support, most of the Mobo OEMs use Realtek NICs, are they fine or should I avoid them? There is not a unique answer... you can find problematic Intel and AMD chipsets so sometimes it's difficult to tell what is better or worse. Again, I would make a pre-selection of some motherboards you like with any additional components you want to add and search on Internet about their support status for the Debian version you want to install (hardware support is not the same for stable than testing). Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.10.19.16.28...@gmail.com
Re: linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:37 +1000, yudi v yudi@gmail.com said: Y Building a new PC, will be used for coding mostly, running 2-3 VMs Y simultaneously. Debian Linux will be the host OS. I need some Y suggestions on Motherboards. Which manufacturer has good linux support? The Ars Technica Guides are great if you're building your own box. The system guides go through parts for a budget box, a hot-rod (better than average) and a God box (top-notch, hopefully with someone else's money). The most recent system guide I've seen was last March. http://arstechnica.com/guides/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/03/ars-system-guide-march-2011-edition.ars -- Karl Vogel I don't speak for the USAF or my company I've seen people with new children before, they go from ultra happy to looking like something out of a zombie film in about a week. --Alan Cox about Linus Torvalds after his 2nd daughter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111019210241.bc4a9b...@kev.msw.wpafb.af.mil
Re: linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
On 10/19/2011 11:28 AM, Camaleón wrote: On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:37 +1000, yudi v wrote: Building a new PC, will be used for coding mostly, running 2-3 VMs simultaneously. Then -although you have not say any specific number- add more ram (8 up to 24 GiB is a good starting point) ;-P 8-24GB? For a development box running 2-3 VMs? That's overkill. Let me explain. At a previous $day_job a few years back we were running a mix of 13 SLES 9/10, W2K3, and Sarge VM guests across two dual CPU dual core Opteron 2GHz IBM blades (4 cores/blade) with VMware ESX3. Each blade had only 8GB RAM. Additionally, were were running the 32 bit VMware kernel with PAE as the native 64bit kernel wasn't available yet. All the VMs were 32bit as well. These were all production server VMs and many had decent load all day long. This included our MSSQL server, two MS AD DCs, a print server, a file server, Novell iFolder server (heavy load), two DHCP servers, a Zen server for imaging laptops (heavy load), two intranet web servers, and the Sarge VM serving NTP, etc, etc, all to ~500 laptop and desktop clients. Even without using the memory consolidation feature of ESX, we were able to vmotion all the guests to one blade allowing us to do maintenance on the other. That's 13 Linux and Windows guest VMs on a single 8GB box, and there was no noticeable decrease in performance on any application when all the VMs were on one blade with only 8GB RAM. With or without using KSM (http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt), Yudi should be able get by easily with 4GB of RAM. As memory is so cheap these days he may as well get 8GB. Anything over that is money wasted, no matter how little, on simply having more buffer cache. If we were runing 13 VMs in 8GB, surely he can run 3 in 4GB. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e9f65ac.4080...@hardwarefreak.com
Re: linux friendly hardware inquiry/advise
On 10/19/2011 10:54 PM, yudi v wrote: 8-24GB? For a development box running 2-3 VMs? That's overkill. Let me explain. snip I think 8GB should give me enough room. Agreed. And it should only cost you about $40 USD for a dual channel kit. Now that's taken care of, moving on to Motherboards; I was keen on the Intel board: Intel BLKDZ68DB Z68/ATX/4DDR3/LGA1155/INTEL Why Intel? AMD will get you more bang for the buck. after reading the reviews, I decided to not get it as it's layout is very poor. everything's crammed close to the CPU socket. next option was to get the Asrock *ASRock Z68 PRO3-M LGA 1155 Intel Z68 4x DDR3 2133 (OC) ** *Phoronix review of Asrock z68 pro-m inspires confidence, one only real issue is with intel graphics, but that should be fixed by using one of the new kernel versions. * *it's got everything I am looking for, Raid 1, HDMI and DP output, read that it's easy to overclock, though to get decent graphics I will have to use at least kernel 3.0.1. I really do not want to go for discreet GPU. Heard Intel's HD 3000 is very good. You didn't mention what processor performance you're after, or core count. If you're not hooked on a Chipzilla solution, take a look at these AMD components: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131657 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103953 The ASUS mobo should have all the features you require. The onboard HD 4250 GPU is more than plenty for your described need. The 3.4GHz dual core Regor 270 is inexpensive and should do everything you *need*, and at a low TDP of 65 watts--always good for building a low noise workstation. Speaking of which, this is the quietest case I've ever seen/owned, and has a nice aesthetic IMO: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811144140 Compact cube style chassis cooled by 2 low RPM 120mm exhaust fans. Great front-to-back straight through airflow. All aluminum chassis. Decent layout. PSU cabling can be a little tight. I have a retail Regor 240 in mine using an embedded HD4250 (no GPU fan). The stock AMD CPU fan is quiet enough that the entire system is barely noticeable. It's a pricey case compared to what I normally buy, but the silence is well worth the ~$85 USD. The only possible downside is only two internal 3.5 HDD bays. But if you need more than 2 drives a decent 4-in-1 2.5 SATA hot swap cage takes care of that problem: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994095 -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e9fb5b0.5030...@hardwarefreak.com
