[Xen-users] New to Xen, looking for advice regarding system configuration

[Braindead <Braindead@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My main purpose would be to support my software development and consulting 
work.  So I need to be able to run various OS's.  I don't develop games so no 
need for any fancy graphics.  I'm used to the limitations of virtual machines 
(use VMWare a lot for dev purposes) and I'm fairly sure Xen can do everything I 
need.

I expect to have 2-3 virtual machines running most of the time, possibly 2 
working hard (for example restoring a gig+ database backup on one while 
programming/doing other tasks on another).  I'll be purchasing 2 identical 
machines one as a backup, so I don't need any extra 'robustness' that a server 
motherboard/system would provide.  Which leads into the following question.

Would it make sense to spend extra bucks on a multi processor motherboard 
rather than going with a single Core i7 or the like?  I think there are i/o 
bandwidth benefits with multi processor boards, however due to a lot of 
database grinding I tend to do I suspect that disk i/o is a limiting factor in 
my case which I'll try to deal with somewhat by RAID0 over 4-5 fast drives.  I 
don't need any redundancy as all variable data (code and the like) is on remote 
servers and already fully backed up.

Do folks generally install X11 on Dom0 so they can get a gui VNC/remote desktop 
into Windows DomU machines?  Or is there some other mechanism available?

Any other system configuration suggestions are appreciated. 

Thanks!

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