Advice on computer to run virtual machines

[ScrambledEggs]

Dell Optiplex 7010 Desktop PC I5-3470 Quad Core 3.2Ghz 16Gb 250GB Windows 10 Pro
HELLO ALL!!
I'm wanting to buy a tower to run virtual machines (Windows 10 & Ubuntu) on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana. nothing expensive. Found this on newegg. What are your opinions on the i5 with 16gb ram?

 

[wizardfromoz]

G'day @ScrambledEggs and a late welcome to linux.org

I have no experience with the machine, but it is a Dell and that is good enough for me.

If you lock in with the Dell, then your next choices are VMs - eg VirtualBox, VMWare, QEMU, &c.

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz

 

[KGIII]

I just recently had the chance to work with just such a machine. It'll run VMs just fine. You can allocate 2 CPUs, throttle them to 90% max, and toss 4096 MB of RAM at the VM. They run like a champ. Well, Linux VMs will run just fine. I have absolutely no idea when it comes to Windows. I don't even dual boot and I haven't used Windows since Vista.

However...

You're gonna want a larger SDD. You can do an HDD, but they'll load significantly slower. VMs take a serious chunk of space once you start getting into them. You can even host them on an external HDD - but, again, they'll load more slowly.

You can probably run two guest OSes at a time, but that'll be fairly slow. One at a time is just fine. Before I handed it over to the new owner, I set up a couple of VMs for them just so they could examine them and change their distro if they found the other distros more suitable for their needs.

 

[dos2unix]

It depends on what virtual Environment you run, most Windows users tend to run Oracle VirtualBox.
That i5 has 4 cores, but it isn't multi-thread. You might want to consider a CPU with multi-threading.

With a 4 core/multi-thread CPU, (2 threads per core) you would have in effect 8 CPUs, as far as VirtualBox is concerned, VMware ESX works the same way. You could keep 2 real cores for your host OS (Windows) and run two vcpus (virtual CPUs) on one linux, and run two vcpus on the second linux.

16 GB is OK, you could have 5GB on two VMs each and that would leave 6GB for your Windows Host.
If you go this route, no throttling is necessary.