Best OS and Hardware to host VB?

[HeliumFX]

I am looking at moving serveral computers that people log into thru RDP to VM's so that we don't have 7 to 10 physical computer running 24/7. I need A "server" that can handle 10 to 15 VM at once. What would be the ideal OS and Hardware platform to run this on?

[Perryg]

That's fairly subjective. The common reply is to use what you are familiar with.
I use Debian minimal since the host does not have to have or do anything, not even a GUI. The real thing that you need to look at is how hard are the guests going to be hammered and what you are going to need hardware wise to accommodate 15 guests.

[HeliumFX]

They will be using MS office (2007) word, exel, and outlook. They also have an appraisal software. Non of the programs are memory intense. They just have a bunch of field people that need access to it but they don't want to install this software on the field people's computers. They want to keep it in house. I am lloking at going with a dual cpu xeon setup with around 32gb ram. Probably go with 4 WD 10Krpm 600gb drives in raid 5 and 1 2TB drive for backing up.

[Perryg]

Should work but depending on the guest OS make sure you have more than plenty of memory. 15 guests at 2GB each should work and leave enough for the hosts part of the process, but the more you have now the better. I would try for a bit more if you can swing it. Just don't install services that you don't need, like 2d/3d acceleration or anything fancy like aero. All of these really hammer the processor.

[Technologov]

10k RPM and 15k RPM drives are next to useless.

Reasons:
1. Price: they cost about 10x times as much as 7200 RPM drives per GB.
1.a. This enters into a direct competition with SSD
2. Performance:
7200 RPM disks: ~120 MB/s or 1 MB/s for random read/write.
10,000 RPM disks: ~170 MB/s or 1.5 MB/s for random read/write.
15,000 RPM disks: ~240 MB/s or 2 MB/s for random read/write.
SSD: ~480 MB/s or 60 MB/s for random read/write.

...for running multiple VMs, SSD will kick ass.
3. Size:
Both 10k and 15k RPM drives are tiny, usually running at 300 GB vs 2 TB for 7200 RPM drives.
SSD are coming in at 240 GB and 480 GB.
Again, this puts them into direct competition vs. the SSD.

Bottom line: It makes sense to go either 7200 RPM (or 5400 RPM) disks -or- SSD.

[mark rumsey]

What OS will the guests be running? If its something fairly tame like WinXP then 2GB per guest should suffice, but if its 64 bit Win7 that might be pushing it a bit. MSOffice is actually a bit of a memory hog anyway and having several large documents open together can eat memory very quickly. And users having large number of documents open simultaneously isn't that uncommon. I myself have on occasions had as many as 14 Word docs of about 30 pages each, a couple of reasonable size Excel spreadsheets, and a dozen Acrobat documents open together because I need to flip between them frequently. Not only does that eat memory, it loads the processor up too, yet none of the documents by themselves are that demanding. Never underestimate what a user will try and do. I would suggest speccing the guests as if they were real machines, then see how much RAM and what sort of processor you will need to support that at a useable speed. there's no point going with an entry level Dual Xeon if the processors are struggling to keep up with the users. With potentially 15 VMs to support there might be a case for splitting the load across two slightly smaller servers instead of trying to cram the lot into one large server.