Will i5 4570r be enough for virtualization?

dunnoguit said:

Hi guys,

First post here. I'm planning to buy a 21" imac for daily use and for virtualization as I'm learning stuff. Probably will be running several Microsoft server systems and some other server software like exchange, sharepoint at the same time, and with some Windows 8 and 7. In the future, maybe some linux. My question is: will the i5 4570r which is provided by the base confuguration be powerful for those? I'm not playing games on iMac so virtualization is the most power-demanding. Sure I will buy with 16g ram and 256g ssd, but just not sure the cpu. Thanks.

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The i5-4570R, as with any desktop i5 processors, only has 4 cores and 4 threads. For one or two VMs, it may be fine, but for more than that, you're going to need at least an i7. Desktop and laptop i7s both have 4 cores and 8 threads.

I don't know how's the performance on an i5, but on my i7 21.5" iMac with 4 threads (which is equal to 2 physical cores), my OS X VMware machine clocks in over 11000 in Geekbench 3 (4GB of RAM assigned).

Normally, for running several VMs together, I assign at least 2 threads to it so that each VM will have one physical core.

On an i5, if you want to assign one physical core to each VM, you can only run two VMs at most simultaneously. On an i7, you can run 4 VMs at most simultaneously. In both cases, each VM has one physical core assigned to it (2 threads).

Oh, and get 16GB of RAM if you're really going to be pushing your VM.

You can run multiple virtual machines on the i5. Memory you should definately get the most available. Also you should consider is running the virtual machines on separate storage. The main bottleneck in virtualization is Storage IO performance.

Perhaps get a Lacie or a Pegasus2 in a RAID 10 configuration your virtual machines should literally fly when on RAID 10.

The SSD should be enough to run 2 maybe 3 vms at once, depending on the IO usage of the vms.

You might want to get the 512GB SSD since vms can get quite large.