Optimal MacPro configuration

A

Alex12

Bit poster
Hi all,

I use Parallels v.10 on a 3,2 GhZ i5, 24 GB Ram iMac and I'm limited to working with 4 VM's simultaneously (each needs at least 4 GB ram to run properly for my needs). If I try to operate a 5th one it's too much for the system as it slows massively the overall performance.
I need to operate 7-9 VM's simultaneously which I think only the MacPro can make it happen. The question is what is the optimal configuration for it and if it makes sense to splash the (heavy) extra cash for upgrading the individual components, i.e. if Parallels Desktop can actually benefit of a better MacPro configuration.
In particular, I'm leaning towards a 3.5 GHz 6-Core with 64 GB Ram, Dual AMD FirePro D500 graphic card and 1 TB flash storage, which is price-wise not very far from the standard model.
Would a 3.0 GHz 8-Core or a Dual AMD FirePro D700 make a difference for using Parallels? It makes a big difference in price, especially the processor, but if it improves substantially the performance that would be important for me.

Thanks in advance for your help guys
 
Theoretically, as I haven't actually ran such setup, I would consider that you have 3 possible bottlenecks.
* Number of physical cores, having at least one core available per VM plus one for the host will give a better performance (the 8 Core, will likely work well for 7 VMs plus one core for the Host OS).
* Available RAM for the system, OS X is RAM hungry, I would consider reserving 6-8 GB for OS X in your case, so a minimum of 42-44 GB for 9 VMs.
* Disk I/O, having all VMs plus the Host OS on the same physical disk hinders performance in a very significant way, all disk access has to be divided between Host and Guests, with 9 VMs, your read and write will theoretically be up to 10 times slower for each, I would consider using an external Thunderbolt RAID array for the VMs for optimal I/O performance.
* Graphics, having more overall Video RAM will help, but I assume you are not experiencing any graphic performance issues, graphics is not your bottleneck.
 
Thanks Specimen, your advice is much appreciated.

Regarding bottlenecks, I use a lot of flash applications that I feel are slowing the system considerably. Maybe the graphics card could be important under that fact?

Also, can you suggest a very fast Thunderbolt RAID for that work? I'm completely clueless about them...
 
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