Ideal current VM laptop?

[jibz]

I'm wondering if anybody who follows the laptop market better than I do has any recommendation for a business laptop that can handle 2-12 simultaneous VMs all windows 7 kernel (Active Directory environment for school labs)

Generally I'm looking for sandybridge i7, 16gb ram, sata3 (have a 240g agility 3 to put in), matte screen(Absolute must) and I tend to prefer NO GPU as it adds cost and power consumption.

Any ideas?

[Generic User #2]

Dell M4600

Generally, only workstation lappys have that much RAM; workstation lappys come with workstation graphic cards.

you're overblowing the GPU issue. If its not being used, it pretty much sits there like a dead fish.

[JD]

12 VM's on a laptop? Yikes. At a bare, bare minimum, you'd need 12GB (1GB per VM) though ideally Windows 7 should have 2GB, so you need 24GB of RAM. And on top of that, all the overhead of the host OS which I'm guessing is also Windows 7, so there's another 2-4GB.

This is for a school lab? I'd strongly advise building a single ESXi or Hyper-V server with say 128GB of RAM and dual quad-core CPUs. Then it's all centrally managed and the students can just install vSphere or Hyper-V Manager on the (existing?) computers.

[jibz]

:( 3rd year Windows Network Services course has us install and configure an entire AD domain including 3-6 2008 r2 servers and sever clients in VMware workstation(product key provided by the school). Alot of us still having Celeron dual core laptop with 4gb of ram and 5400rpm drive for page file and just booting up the lab can take 2 hours.

Using laptops for school has been the ultimate frustration for me >_<

[Keywork]

You're blowing this completely out of proportion. I took a similar class about a year ago, and I had no problem running an AD forest and some client VM's on a core 2 duo, 4GB HP Elitebook. You don't need to give every VM 1GB of ram. One thing to point out when booting domain controllers is that they DO TAKE FOREVER to come up regardless of hardware.

[ADay2Long]

Originally Posted by Keywork

One thing to point out when booting domain controllers is that they DO TAKE FOREVER to come up regardless of hardware.

Amen, my setup ran on a Core2Duo with 4GB of RAM laptop. If I had the chance I would only suspend my VMs so I didn't have to boot them all the time cause it was slow.....

[JD]

Originally Posted by Keywork

You're blowing this completely out of proportion. I took a similar class about a year ago, and I had no problem running an AD forest and some client VM's on a core 2 duo, 4GB HP Elitebook. You don't need to give every VM 1GB of ram. One thing to point out when booting domain controllers is that they DO TAKE FOREVER to come up regardless of hardware.

AFAIK Windows 7 does not install with anything less than 1GB, unless you do some hacks.

To be honest, I would just build a quad-core (AMD or Intel) desktop with 24-32GB of RAM, maybe a pair of SSD's in RAID0, and run Hyper-V/ESXi on it. Setup a VPN or use one of those free remote access services, and just connect to it from school on whatever laptop you have. I'm guessing it would cost you about the same as an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM.

[jibz]

The problem with a remote system is that I cannot use it for practical exams.

[JD]

Originally Posted by jibz

The problem with a remote system is that I cannot use it for practical exams.

If it's anything like my school, everyone cheats regardless But I know what you mean.

Thankfully my school provided us with quad-core Xeon workstations with 16GB of RAM. I can't imagine going to a school where you're forced to buy your own hardware just to pass the course, unless tuition was greatly reduced.

[jibz]

The only hardware my college has for IT is racks of cisco routers and switches. A laptop with virtualization for 64 bit VMs is a requirement.

I cant even picture what using school owned computers would be like, I can only imagine they would be vandalized like crazy.