Dear All,
I am assigned with a task of Virtualization like I am having 5 physical Machines (Dell Optiplex 330 with Core2Duo Processor, 2 GB of Ram & 160 GB Hardisk each) now i want to combine these five physical machine into one single machine. I will be having 5 processors, 10 GB Ram & 800 GB of hard disk if it is combined. Then I have to install fedora on the single machine & start virtualization. I want to know it is possible to combine 5 physical machine into one single machine ?. Kindly help me guys..............................

Yes, you can do it. How well it will work will depend on what those servers will be doing.

Just to be clear. Fedora only supports any one version for 13 months, after that there will be no updates of any kind. The setup you are describing will take while to configure, do you really want to have to do it all over again in thirteen months? If you like RH based distros but cannot afford the license have a look at Centos. Centos is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed. Centos is free to download/update (unlike RHEL) and is binary compatible with RHEL. Centos5.X(5.4 is current) will have support until 2014. Since RHEL/Centos5 was based on FC6 it will "feel" very similar.

Thanks for your reply lazlow, is there any software to combine 5 physical machines into one single machine?, if it is pls specify the software, then only I can install Fedora or Centos. Please help me out guys

Take a look at VMware server. Generally you build one instance (virtual machine) of VMware for each machine you are replacing. You install an OS on the physical machine to act as the host for all the virtual machines(guest OSs).

Once again thanks lazlow, once I combine these five machines as one single machine, I will get huge amount of hardware, then I can install VMware EXi Server in that, so I can start creating Virtual Servers & allot hardware according to the usage. Please help me is there any software that can combine hardware to a single machine.

[Speaking humbly as more novice than advanced]
It would seem to me...
That you are attempting to use all 5 computer's RAM and hard drives onto a single machine of the same type...
*Each machine has 2 GB RAM as you said, and I would presume that each machine has a single stick of 2 GB RAM. You will likely be limited to only 4 GB RAM because they are likely dual-channel. Also the motherboard you use will also determine your ability to use the RAM, probably, again, limiting you to 4 GBs of RAM without buying expensive hardware.
*Also, you're Hard Drive controllers and their number of slots will limit you to a specific number of slots for hard drive. All 5 are not likely to fit.
*For the core(s), I would think it's not likely to install more than two of them in the current casing, due to size and power supply limitations.

If you are know about all that and you're question is only software nothing more, than I would recommend Sun's Virtualbox. Especially the non-free version [the software is freely usable for yourself and is free of charge, just the license is tweaked a bit, thats all]. This will enable the creation of many virtual hard disks. It is simple to download and install, and the interface is nice & clean and will get your task done quickly and efficiently, probably exactly the way you want it.
Simply google "Virtual Box" and click the first link that shows up. then navigate to the "downloads" link and all the instructions will be for your distro right there. Please note though, that some of your performance in the guest distros will be limited by your processors and graphics card.
[End humble, more novice than advanced] [just trying to help]

leopard

VMWare has utilities that allows you to take an image of a physical machine and load it onto VMWare ESXi:
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
I'm also pretty sure you could use a generic hard drive cloning utility (clonezilla, maybe even dd) and load it onto a virtual machine.

ronee_col

Are you under the impression that you can combine your current hardware into one large machine and run it under one OS? That is not possible. You can run multiple VMs(vmware or virtualbox) on one machine or you can make a cluster (multiple machines and OS running one task). I guess at this point I do not understand what you are asking for.