What would be best for a Hyper-V host?

[NathanE]

Can't make my mind up between having:

Dual Xeon's at 1.8GHz (Nehelem architecture, no Hyperthreading), so 8 real cores total.

Or just a single i7 950 at 3.06GHz, so 4 real cores and 4 virtual cores.

What do you guys think?

Our CPU loading isn't expected to be that high but it will probably end up running about 10 or 12 VM's eventually. It will have 24GB memory.

 

[NathanE]

Budget is the issue. A HP/Dell server of this spec would cost several grand.

Whereas the few I've spec'd up are coming in around £1200-1300. This is with Supermicro/Tyan motherboards.