some of those questions i would say are personal choices.
what game servers are you running? also have a think about the bandwidth requirements this will have an effect.
0) in short the more CPU and RAm you can throw at these tasks the better.
1) i would say if you can get 2x Quad core CPUs go for it their are lots tasks you could use for them.. video encoding/transcoding should make good use of it also. i'm looking to either use some old work work stations which are either dual or quad cores Xeons. this does depend on how your setup is running are you oing all of the tasks at the same time or one at a time?.
If one at a time then a single CPU dual core should be good enough.
if your doing it all at the same time then Quad core or more, bottle neck may be FSB transfer speed.
2) AMD vs Intel CPUs .... whole can of whoop ass on you possible.. i think mist people ill say Intel for the stability, but the Opertans do look good.. personal preference is Intel, but i've an AMD laptop and that has serviced me very well so very happy with that.
3) Ram requirements, mmmm at a rought guess, 4gb per VM, again all dependent on work bing done and requirements of the software. recomened 16bb ram. a bottle neck will still exist, the FBS so if you have apps which need a lot of read writes and transfer speed you'll see som stuttering or slow ness.
4) ESXI machine creation : i'd recomend making the machines outside of ESXI and then importing them into the esxi enviroment. i always found it hard to do via esxi, plus you'll lean a bit more about it that way. you'll need the ISO images to transfer to the ESXI host or do a pass through
5) hard disk setup : suggested : USB memory stick for ESXI, 1 hard disk per VM or 2 VMs per hard disk if the I/O speeds of applications are not a problem.
i dont think you'll find much for £200 try having a look at the N36l and N40l and N56l thread its amazing what some of those people are doing with those boxes, this thread hear :
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18216324
i dont deal with servers on a regular basis's so my answers maybe incorrect to those with more experience. but to be honest these days you can do pretty much everything on standard desktop hardware and dont need specialist server hardware unless you need the redundancy and guaranteed 24x7 up time. the hardware these days is mostly reliable if you get half decent brands and just as fast or faster than some servers!!
ow and if you know some people in IT might be worth seeing if they are disposing of older equipment that perhaps is classed as business end of life, but still servicable for consumerlife
