Windows 2008 Server on VMWare (hardware)

Posted by Bill on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Bill
Published on 2011-02-08T17:20:42Z Indexed on 2011/03/11 8:12 UTC
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vmware-esxi

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hardware-selection

I want to setup a single server to run a few virtual servers for our datacenter. I do not have a lot of money to spend so I am trying to gain bang for the buck. My budget is around $2,000.

So I was thinking about building the following as the VMWare physical server:

Intel iCore 7 950 (LGA1366, 4 cores,8 threads)
Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 LGA 1366 X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
24 GB of Viper II Series, Sector 7 Edition, Extreme Performance DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL9 Triple Channel Memory
VelociRaptor 300GB 10,000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

I am planning on running the newest version of VMWare ESXi (64-bit).

On these I am planning on running a few various servers:

Windows 2008 Server R2 w/ IIS (several custom built ASP.NET Apps)
Windows 2008 Server R2 w/ MS SQL 2008 Database Server
Linux Web Server w/ Several WordPress Blogs (XAMPP?)
Windows 2008 Server R2 w/ IIS (DEV ENVIRONMENT)
Windows 2008 Server R2 w/ MS SQL 2008 Database Server (DEV ENVIRONMENT)

In your opinion, will this hardware be sufficient to run the above load with room for possible 2-3 more virtual machines (probably lightweight web servers)?

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