Hardware Upgrade Suggestions

[dafunkphenom]

I currently run VMWARE Workstation 6 on my host with 5 guests (A mix of Server 2003 and XP machines). I want to expand to 7 or 8 machines and will definitely need to upgrade my hardware in order to do so. I have been reading many threads and I am a bit confused on which way I should go to maximize bang for the buck. Currently I just have a simple AD lab but I may want to add a machine to run a SQL DB and also a machine to run a linux file server. I'll explain my current hardware configuration.

Motherboard = ASUS P5X SE

CPU = E6550 2.33 GHz w/ EM64T

I have 4 SATA HD's but all my VM's are hosted on a single Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB disk.

4 GB DDR2 667 MHz

When I built the machine I made sure to get hardware that is upgradeable toi run x64 and expand the RAM to 8 GB if need be. The one thing I forgot however is disk I/O. If I just go ahead and get more memory and upgrade my CPU will I still be bottlenecked by having all my VM's on a single disk?

If this is the case, what is my cheapest option if I plan to upgrade my hardware? I may want to try VMWARE ESX 3i as well so I need the hardware to be compatible with both workstation and ESX. From what I read, some people have been successful getting ESX to install using a SATA/SAS raid controller. This would be a bonus since I can save money be salvaging my 4 SATA drives from my current machine.

I am open to all comments, suggestions or links that will help prepare me for my next project.

Thanks in advance.

[dafunkphenom]

I noticed a typo in my previous post. My motherboard is an ASUS P5K SE

[nick_couchman]

First of all, if you can dedicate the hardware to this and don't need to use it for anything else, I'd definitely suggest running ESXi. If you want to make sure you get hardware compatible with ESXi, look at the VMware HCL as well as the ESXi forum and some of the ESX/ESXi whitebox sites out there. You should be able to get a pretty good idea of hardware that is safe to use but that won't cost you a fortune.

If you're going to run 7-8 VMs, I'd say you'll probably want a minimum of a single quad-core CPU, and you may want to purchase a MB that supports more than one CPU for expansion later. AD by itself shouldn't require a lot of RAM, but you'll need a decent amount for SQL Server. I'd say you'd want 8GB for your physical host at the least.

[dafunkphenom]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have found some whitebox sites and a valuable link describing the success of using the HP ML110 as the cheapest solution for a VMWARE supported machine. My goal is to find the cheapest hardware solution that will allow me to run 7 VM's with decent performance. The only application I can envision running that would require a fair amount of resources is SQL server. I would probably want to run McAfee ePO as well for testing. Anybody out there with any hardware suggestions, feel free to comment. It is greatly appreciated.