We recently were running 5-6 VM's off a Quad-Core Xserve with 48gigs of ram that was hooked up to a 6th G-tech eSata external (which housed all the VM's).
All the VM's were running Windows 7 Professional, with one as the "server host". The server host had one processor and 4 gigs of ram allocated to it. All other VM's had 1 processor with 2 gigs of ram. We were simply running a workgroup. On that "server" was a SQL database, a quickbooks database, and an Oracle based database.
Over time the X-serve just seemed to not handle things anymore (and we needed more vm's for more employees), so we were able to use our video editor's 12-core Mac Pro with 56gigs of Ram for our new "VM server". We recently got him the new Mac Pro.
Now on the 12-core (running OSX 10.8.5 serveR) we are running 9 (newly rebuilt) VMs (all Windows 7 Pro 32bit), except we rebuilt the Windows "server host" to be 64bit and have allocated 4 processors and 6gigs of ram to it. We put the server host on a SSD Hybrid4th drive in Bay 2, then evenly split the other 8 VM's on the same types of drives in Bays 3 & 4.
We've noticed that the free ram of the 12-core is slowly going away, and I'm curious if turning BUFFERING off would help to basically prolong how long the Mac Pro can stay on before being rebooted to refresh all the resources...
The X-serve was able to stay on for weeks at a time, but as we put more VM's on it, we ended up having to reboot it every evening, in the end.
Now with the Mac Pro, I want to make sure I have this setup properly to keep it running as long as possible and be the most stable. I know the machine can handle all these VM's. I just don't know if I have it configured as "optimally" as possible.
Any advice would be welcomed.