We have a physical server that I'd like to convert into a virtual machine (convert or set-up from scratch in a VM) on new hardware and I'm just wondering what spec of host server I should be looking at.
Currently the physical server is a 6 year old Dell Poweredge 1800 with two Xeon 3.00GHz dual core processors and 4GB RAM running Windows Small Business Server 2003 (using Exchange and SQL 200 server mainly).
We'll probably be upgrading the guest server OS in the next 12 months but until then we'll be sticking with Windows 2003 SBS which is only 32Bit so would be limited to 4GB RAM when run as a guest OS anyway.
There's a possibility we might run another guest OS too but I'm just not sure what spec of server I should be looking at for the host. Should I look for one or two xeons (and how many cores)? and should I go for xeons with hyperthreading or not? and is 16GB of RAM OK?
I'm happy enough to use Linux as the host OS to save buying more MS licenses - I've used Ubuntu mainly, any recommendations for host OS?
Thanks.