I am interested in the following (excuse my English language):

We will be buying a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with either 1 Quad Core processor at 2,33 GHz or 2 Dual Core processors at 2,33 GHz. We will be using this machine in a test lab only and will be testing mainly Exchange 2007 and Active Directory. So we would like to deploy several Exchange 2007 VM's and several W2K3 R2 Domain Controller VM's on it. We will be running ESX 3.0.1 (or the newest version at that time)

We are doubting between the following configurations, both DELL 2900's. We will unfortunately only be buying one system so we definately need to make the right choice.

As I said we want to buy a system with either 2 Dual Cores or 1 Quad Core, see here under:

- 1 Quad Core 2.33 GHz Processor, Xeon 5345 Chip
- 2 Dual Core 2.33 GHz Processors, Xeon 5140 Chip

Both systems will have 8 GB of 667 MHz RAM and 3 72GB 15K SCSI discs to start with.

We have contacted Dell and we know for a fact the the 5345 Xeon will be available in January at the latest.

We dont really care about the price at this moment.

The first thing that comes to mind when making a choice, to me is the fact that if one Quad would not be enough, we could always plug in another one .

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I would go for more sockets occupied and proven technology.

The quad cores are so new that for me it would come too fast.

If price doesn't matter I would go for two Quad-Cores

Be aware that ESX is officially only supported with a minimum of two physical CPU's. So in the configurations that you are suggesting, only the 2CPU Dual-Core system is supported.

Also make sure that ESX itself supports your system when you buy it. It can be the case that your system is not yet supported with the Quad-Core CPU's at the time that Dell starts delivering them.

I didnt know that , where is this documented? Can you point me to this on the vmware site?

Hi Victor,

In this document you will find the system requirements for ESX server:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_installation_guide.pdf.
Page 24

Thanks for that. So that really means that running ESX on only one dual core cpu is not supported?

I have this page bookmarked:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pubs.html

Contains all the links to the Hardware Compatibility Lists. Server compatibility is listed in the "Server Guide"

Yes, that is correct. It works just fine, but is not supported.

How to lower cpu usage on a Windows Vista? My computer is slow. I thought it was the registry errors, but it wasn't. I defragged my computer, and still, no good signs. I check the processes in the task manager and the only programs running are the ones I need. I thought my computer would run good with 2gb of RAM. Does the cpu "02" in the processes in the task manager make any difference?
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This topic is 2,5 years old

question has no relation with ESX at all

you could try http://tweakers.net/ in the RIGHT forum topic (vista?)

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Het is wel zo fatsoenlijk een oplossing aan het eind te posten, als mensen de moeite nemen jou te helpen..

Lol.. ik begon al te lezen en had nog niet direct door dat het 2006 was, had al zoiets van wtf

@tomw hieronder, aangezien je licenties per fysieke cpu betaald is het natuurlijk altijd verstandig om zoveel mogelijk cores per cpu te nemen.. mocht je de extra cores niet nodig hebben, dan is het alsnog een verstandige investering in de toekomst.

Er is echter 1 maar... sommige licenties zijn per cpu, of dit nu een enkele (fysieke) cpu is, een core of in sommige gevallen een virtuele cpu. Zelfs als je niet alle cpu's zou kunnen toewijzen moet je alsnog voor alle cpu's licenties hebben. (hyper threading valt daar overigens niet onder).

I would recommend 16GB RAM and dual processor dual core.

slotje zou op zijn plaats zijn

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Het is wel zo fatsoenlijk een oplossing aan het eind te posten, als mensen de moeite nemen jou te helpen..