I'm trying to decide between deploying ESX 3i on;

a) Two Quad-Core low-speed Xeons (say 1.6- 2 Ghz)

-or- b) One Quad-core High Speed Xeon (say 3.33 Ghz)

The money is about the same between the two of them.

I'll be using 15k SAS drives in a RAID10 arrangement, running 64 Bit Windows 2008 as a Terminal Server, with 1-2 other Windows servers running in the VM Space. I will had a seperate virtual striped array off the PERC 6i to run swap files. The main RAID10 array will share disk space with the other VM's.

I'll have plenty of RAM: 16-30 gig, so it won't be starved.

In the end, what will make the largest difference to the perceived user environment? I was a server that seems to run their Word/Excel/Outlook centered day as snappily as possible.

I know there is some overhead in any SMP, and I believe a quad-core is superior to two-dual cores, as there is less ovehead when the cores are on the same die (correct?).

Does the way VMWare virtualized the CPU's and threads make it less necessary to have lots of cores available to keep response time high?

Any comments will be appreciated here.

Thanks.