I'm making a Xen server for my house. It's going to run something like the following VMs:
- Windows 7 VM as a personal/frag box (I anticipate doing some 3D gaming via a VT-d passthrough of a video card)
- Linux development server (CentOS--low load webserver for me to play with Django on).
- Nexenta ZFS file server (potentially with a VT-d SAS card, but not sure yet)
- Windows Server 2008R2 Domain Controller.
- Windows 7/XP test environment.
- Linux (probably gentoo) test environment.
The last two won't be on all of the time, nor will I be doing development/heavy load tasks on the other VMs while I'm using the first to play games or whatnot.
My question is this:
Should I buy a single-socket motherboard and a single CPU, or a dual-socket/dual CPU combo? I know it depends on the CPU: If I go with the single option, I'll probably buy a Core i7 2600 or better CPU (not the K edition, since it apparently doesn't support VT-d). If I go with the double CPU option, I'd probably buy two somewhere in the 5520-5550 model range. Obviously these are at different price points, and I'd prefer the cheaper option, but I don't want to trade low cost for performance. How necessary is dual-processor configuration for this server? What other suggestions do people have for this build? I ask because it's very difficult to match Xen performance benchmarks to specific use cases like this, and am hoping that others have anecdotes/references that I don't.