Re: Will RDi finally support 64 bit OS?

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote:

Justin Taylor skrev den 26-02-2008 17:04:

You ask, why do I need more than 4GB in a development box?

Eclipse loves a lot of memory for large projects. The more the merrier :)

Okay, but I think it's silly. I have a machine that regularly runs WDSC *and* RBD *and* open office *and* thunderbird *and* firefox *and* iseries navigator *and* putty *and* iseries access.

Right now, in fact, I've got all those applications up, and while they have admittedly small projects, my current memory commitment is 1.3GB. Everything flies, and it's an incredible working environment. Also, the entire machine (including a 3GHz dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 160GB 10K SATA drive) cost about $800, with Windows XP installed.

Now, if you're running virtual machines on your workstation, then you have memory issues. But really, you should be running VMs on a box dedicated to the VMs. That one may require a 64-bit OS to be able to run massive amounts of memory, but you wouldn't be running WDSC or RDi on that machine (typically).

What I have is a workstation without RAID and a server with RAID. The RAID server runs my production VMs, but the VMs are also backed up onto USB storage. If the server goes down hard (motherboard, meteorite, four-year-old with a peanut butter sandwich, whatever), I can temporarily run the VMs on the workstation. The workstation and server are both backed up onto the USB storage. I wrote a about that in a recent article:

http://www.mcpressonline.com/system-administration/general/the-reality-of-virtual.html

Joe

P.S. My workstation is actually a 2GHz E2180, but I specifically got a motherboard made for overclocking and am running at 3GHZ with no extra cooling. It's also in a case that's not much bigger than a bowling ball. I slapped on a couple of external drives to add 1.5TB of USB storage for a little over $300.