Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » Why go x64?

July 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Why go x64?

TAGS: Toys and tools

I just brought up my el'cheapo special from Fry's and here's why I went to an AMD x64 instead of staying 32bit for my desktop.

On one of my many trips to silicon valley I ran across a 1 day special at Fry's for a super deal on an ECS K8T890-A motherboard, an AMD dual core x64 CPU and a couple sticks of 1gb ram...all for around $450.00 Such a deal, but why x64 instead of spending on a dual CPU Xeon or one of the other really spanky deals?

Simply put...virtualization. With Microsoft and VMWare giving away their virtual server products, it just makes sense to carve off a few virtual machines on this beefy box so that I can test out software with impunity. The basic concept is that I can install the x64bit version of either package and then under that carve off virtual machines with varying amounts of system resources. So I stay in the familier Windows world, but with virtual Linux machines and virtual Windows servers at my finger tips. So that misbehaving beta doesn't kill my workstation nor do I have to keep test servers up all the time.

We've gone much further with VMWare ESX server (baremetal) so that our dual opteron based server could support upwards of six virtual machines (mix of Linux and Windows) in order to support our simulated enterprise in last year's Identity Management Shootout. The really cool part was being able to "revert" to a baseline configuration for each vendor within minutes instead of regenning the whole bunch.

Might I suggest you drop by the Microsoft Virtual Server Site and checkout release 2 for download and also take a visit to the VMWare Site where you also download free virtual machine images.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on July 3, 2006 10:13 AM

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