
Originally Posted by
Moby-Dick
I'd still go for ESX - that way you can leverage the DRS and Vmotion capabilities of moving guests between each host. You'd also be better of using an iSCSI san rather than local discs - again the shared storage would get over the IO issues. ESX has a much lower overhead that vmware server as it doesn't sit on top of an OS , its just the hypervisor.
Quad core boxes are definatly the way to go on it though. I usually allocate the service console about half a gig of memory , but that only because i run a few extra processes inside it. I dont have to worry as much about the CPU reservation for the hypervisor as it always takes precedence. I can't see much of a problem with the spec you've gone for , but I'd certainly look at different storage ( with the costs of decent disc controllers etc, a SAN is a much nicer way of doing it )