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Ok.. Here's a couple of questions.. I am looking at running 4 VMWares on a PC. Each of them need to have their own Audio Output, would they each need to be assigned to their own sound card? Also, would a Quad Core PC w/4GB of RAM be enough to run 4 VMwares simultaneously? Can you assign VMWares to their own video cards? Just keeping things vague at the moment.. But I am working on an idea that might turn out pretty neat for others if it works out..

TIA!

eGo

I can easily answer those questions for you. I use VMware on a regular basis, both at home and at work, and I've had a lot of experience with it.

You can assign each Virtual Machine it's own sound card, but you don't have to. They can all output seperate sounds through the same sound card, but if you want them to, say, output to different sets of speakers, you would probably need seperate cards.

That PC should be plenty powerful enough. Each VM should run as a seperate process, so you could easily assign the affinity of each of the four VMs to one core each. But then the VM would have to be set to use only one processor (core). I would also suggest limiting each VM to about 768MB of memory a piece, leaving some memory for your host OS.

To answer your last question, no, you cannot assign each VM it's own video card. VMWare essentially creates a virtual computer, using emulated components. This newest version of Workstation, 6.5, is the first one to support any kind of hardware acceleration. And it's limited to DirectX 9, and Windows XP only.

Grant you, I do not have multiple cards to test this theory, but VMware offers no options to select video cards like it does sound cards.

Hope this helps

AT IMTS there was this company selling boxes that tied into the network and used a computer for its CPU HD and ram, but the box had hookups for USB video and keyboard. You could run like 20 "computers" off of one normal computer anywhere on your network.

everyone else covered it very well...not much to add but to restate that yes, a host with those specs should have no issue at all running four vm's. it just depends what the vm's will be doing that determine the maximum you can successfully run. most likely, RAM will be your limiting factor.