There are a couple of questions here; I'm looking at an advert in the US Linux magazine for an 8 x dualcore Xeon Server with 32Gb of RAM, 1Tb of Disk and built-in Gigabit, for US$20,000.

(1) Which would be the best Linux - free or commercial - to use that can properly utilise this amount of processor and memory?

(2) Does VMWare for Linux allow you to run Microsoft Servers/applications?

I'm thinking that this would be an excellent way to consolidate a few non-critical, low overhead applications that I have to run.

Any comments greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Harry

(1) more or less any, but if we're talking business go for SLES, RHEL, (both have a hefty support fee) or CentOS (which is a RHEL clone you can get for free but without support). If it's for VMWare you should look what VMWare is certified for i.e. which host OSes it supports.

(2) I suppose we're taking about VMWare Server here. Yes you can run Windows OSes on any VMWare product. Again, have a look at the VMWare doc to see which guest OSes it supports.

It is indeed an excellent way. For performance-critical applications, you might want to consider ESX Server which has its own base-OS (a modified Linux kernel) but which is quite expensive.