Overkill, I hear about servers with 16GB of RAM. I got my 1st box with 24GB of RAM early in '07. I was a VERY happy camper! Dell PE2900 2 x 2.66QC running SLES 10 to host a myraid a of VM's. Sadly, politics has kept the box from being used as it could...only have 7 VM's on it now.
The little Asus 1U RS120 4-drive models are fantastic for the price, about $600 from NewEgg. Add a 3Ware 9550 controller & battery backup unit, 4 VelociRaptors, *only* 8 GB RAM, and a QC 2.46ghz q6600, one has a great box for under $2K. With two out of four planned for VM production use actuall in production, has given us time to kick the tires on them.
With *only* 8GB RAM, these things scream...not as much as that PE2900, but it's still close. Comparing the Asus 120 1U with a Dell 1U PE850 (3.6Ghz w/HT) with two SCSI disks and another like model with SATA drives, both in RAID-1 config, both with Dell PERC cards, there is not much to be said other than "WOW"! I can't believe we even tried to use a P4 for Virutualization. Sure that's all anyone had, but man oh man, the performance difference between the Asus and older Dell "pizza" box 1U server models was striking.
Even SuSe 11.0 x64, which is slow in it's own right, was faster running under WIndows 2003 on the Asus RS120 than it running natively on the old box.
I heard that iNtel has brought back HT for these new i7 series CPU's. Is that true!?!?