In part 2 of his series, Tom benchmarks the device to have a baseline to compare the virtual machines he will run on it after installing VMware Workstation.
Tom gets his hands on SimplyNUC's most powerful AMD-powered mini-PC, the Moonstone, sticks Workstation on it and declares: "This thing is a beast in a very small package."
Tom does parallel testing of iSCSI and NFS, along with testing NFS SSD VMs, iSCSI SSD VMs, multimedia performance and more.
Tom checks its suitability for the mass storage and protection of his home and lab files and data.
After previous benchmarking tests, Tom attempts to install and run a bare-metal hypervisor on the low-priced, small form-factor PC.
Tom installs Workstation on an ACEMAGIC AD15 Mini PC to benchmark its performance running a small and large Windows 10 VM.
Tom puts the small form-factor device through its paces to see what type of workload it is best suited for.
There are various reasons why you may want to reflect the actual hardware the VM is running on rather than as a VM; by adding these three lines to the VMware configuration file, you can easily reflect this.
Tom explores Autostart on Workstation Pro 17 to avoid multiple manual virtual machine restarts upon an automatic reboot of Windows 11.
Tom continues to investigate how various OSes running the Horizon client react when network conditions are less than ideal, for example, when networks drop packets, have limited bandwidth and/or experience latency issues.
Tom tries operating systems not on VMware's guest OS compatibility list, finding some work to varying degrees, some not at all.
Tom Fenton investigates performance differences between virtual and physical machines.
With an i7-1360P processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 512 NVMe device for storage, it should handle the most demanding home and office workloads.
Sessions are divided into five tracks: Vision & Innovation, Cloud & Edge Infrastructure, Modern Applications & Cloud Management, Networking & Security and Hybrid Workforce.
Tom Fenton finds that Windows IoT Enterprise works fine as a base OS to run a thin client used to connect to a VDI desktop and a local desktop using RDP.