I am almost certainly going to by Workstation 10 but would be grateful for some guidance
I have a 12 core machine (2xX5690 3.46GHz 6-Core) machine with 96GB I have 4 600gb SAS disks in two Raid 1 pairs for 2 logical disk
I intend to host with Linus and have mixture of LAMP and Windows server 2012 VM's. The Windows machines will need 4-8 cores (hyper threads count) and at least 8GB of RAM.
While with windows machine will be "powered on" at the same time they will rarely all run flat-out at the same time - so am hoping to tolerate a certain amount of overcommitment.
Questions
1 is Workstation as efficient as the full Wmware Suite at sharing resources: I am seeing it as having the same core technology -- bit is that correct?
2 What distribution of Linux is the best for ease of setting up and admin (I am excluding pricy enterprise versions)
3 Are SAS disks OK are should I switch one pair to SATA -- a read somewhere in the WMW WS cannot use an OS "preinstalled on a SAS partition" - does that matter?
4 Can Similar VM's share the OS code files -- it looks like Child VM can share the OS files with its parent but I am not clear how that works?
5 Is it realistic to operate the suggested setup with WMW support -- I do not plan on buying 10 licenses?
6 Can you script a power off/power on cycle for a specific WM to be run from the host - the idea would be to reboot Windows VMs from a "virgin" snapshot of the OS on a schedule?
Many thanks !