Hi, I've been in the linux system administration world for 18 months already. I've heard so much about virtualization (Xen and ESX) and I want to try it out but unfortunately I do not currently have access to servers or any modern hardware that supports it.

I'm planning to buy a machine strictly for testing purposes; I've selected what I think would be a good Desktop setup:
OR
for just a little bit more?

- Would this setup be a good start to try out linux virtualization at home?
- Should I move to quad cores instead? (and be able to dedicate each cores to 4 VMs)
- Should I buy an additional HD and set it to RAID or else my VMs would experience a bottleneck when accessing disks?

Thanks in advance.

personally i would go with
my xseries235 uses the Xeon cpu and they are great!

I have not used quad cores yet but i want to. if you have the money go for it.

I would go for an AMD system instead of an Intel system because AMD cost a lot less on a total system setup. Faster the processor, faster the virtual machine will go. Yes, using a separate hard drive for a virtual machine is the best way to improve performance. For memory usage, figure about 64 MB to 128 MB more memory for each virtual machine. If you set the memory size to 128 MB for the virtual machine, it will need about 192 MB. I suggest go for 8 GB of memory because I think 4 GB is pushing it when running four virtual machines.