What is the best configuration for housing 5-6 VMs for RDP access?

[devmog]

I'm a devleoper looking to set up a server that houses a handful of vms for the purpose of cross-browser testing. I think the product I should be looking at is vSphere, but I'm having difficulty finding resources about what kind of hardware might be needed for this purpose. My questions boil down to:

1. What specs should I be looking for in a host server which is to house ~6 vms running GUI operating systems. Being able to run a GUI OS and a browser at reasonable speeds is the main objective. What hardware to buy...

2. Since this is a fairly common intent (vms for cross-browser testing on a stand-alone remote server), is there a prefered or standard VMWare solution for setting this up? Any pointers on vSphere config (assuming vSphere is the right product)?

Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask, pointing to the right forum appreciated.

Cheers.

[idle-jam]

may i know what will be the hosted VM running, with 5 to 6 i would take it as normal server setup and RDP best practices thats all.

[devmog]

I'll assume all the VMs to be Windows, vista and 7. I may have a few ubuntus.

I'm really wondering what sort of server hardware would be appropriate, having not procured a lot of server hardware in the past...

What if I wanted to scale it up to 12-24 vms?

[idle-jam]

you can use vmware capacity planner to monitor desktop and then size accordingly.

but i would go with 2 x 6cores, with 64GB RAM (assuming each desktop is 2GB) and then the HDD would be a sharing of 4 user per disks. SAS or FC or SSD would be even better. this is to ensure that the iops of normal desktop can be cater.

[idle-jam]

if it's local HDD make sure it has battery back write cache too.