so right now i have a few middle ground systems that have no VMs. 2.5 ghz amd opteron 64 bit. is my best with 2 gigs of RAM. i was thinking of either getting one or two high powered xenon's with a pile of RAM for them and doing virtual servers for my testing and few production servers at home. or i was thinking of getting more cheaper microITX intel atom boards and running individual servers on all of them. i cant decide which would be a better option for power consumption and management ect. what are your guys thoughts

--jezzirolk

The opteron generally supports VM's but you'd have to check the system specs. I'd add in more ram to that and use for a testbed.

We have piles of dual 4x xeon servers with plenty or ram. They are monsters for work but when we bought them it was kind of expensive. For the most part you get what you pay for.

Sun systems had a claim of the best overall power per click. The problem was you were kind of limited on the sparc systems. Sure Solaris is good and runs VM's but unless you have training you need to start all over from scratch almost.

Power issues are both a load on the racks but in most rooms a very expensive load on AC even in winter we need to run AC. Saving power in some cases can pay for new servers in a few months. It is well worth looking into and doing some load calculations.

what exactly are you looking to build here? the hardware you describe is not a good fit for proper virtualization, but it can be enough for certain tasks.