Hey, long post, a little unusual so sorry in advance.
just looking for some advice about running several virtual machines on one server, its hardware requirements and what to expect in terms of performance.
since i don't have much experience running such a server, nor with xen hypervisor, i thought i would ask someone who does.
first of all i will explain a little on the uses of machine.
It will run several operating systems through a xen hypervisor. i am a little new to xen and its technologies, but i think i want a hardware assisted virtual environment, one that takes advantage of say amd-v etc.
it will have several machines:
1) the host
2) a router with pfsense
3) a file server, preferably with raid 1
4) a p2p server running mldonkey
5) maybe one machine dedicated to running one or two virtualbox machines. these virtualbox machines will mainly be static, something to play around and target with backtrack, nothing too resource heavy; idle most of the time.
6) a separate vpn machine that can have traffic proxied through it.
7) possibly a separate snort ids machine.
this all sounds pretty demanding, but it will only really serve a small network, one or two machines, both mine.
the three virtual machines that could be considered active and the most resource hungry would be the router, p2p server and possibly the vpn server; although used, they would not be used with insane intensity. the rest would be used reasonably sparingly.
obviously because this will be running my router, amongst other things, i plan to leave it running for some lengths of time, so i thought about some low power cpus.
this one in particular:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-a...che-45w-retail
i thought about the phenom 955 as it is fast and has l3 cache, but it operates at 125w max. the athlon lacks l3 cache, and for it to handle so many tasks at once,
i thought possibly this would affect the latency of traffic traversing my router. think it matters?
i also considered running 4gb of ddr2, say 800mhz simply because of the price. think i should stick to a higher clock ddr3? would 4gb be enough?
over and above all, i was building this machine to get rid of a lot of separate hardware i have running, but i want to make sure that my server can handle several tasks while my router respects low latency for gaming.
thanks.