As I mentioned, I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Virtual Server lately to build virtual lab environment for testing and research. The box we put it on can only take about 16 virtual machines started at once, but that’s nothing a few more sticks of RAM won’t fix. Here’s a nice screenshot of those 16 VMs starting up at once: screens/virtual_server_taskman_02.png

The box actually has two hyper-threaded cpu’s (which I need to disable), but the One Graph, ALL CPUs view was a little more impressive. And the systems were still very responsive.

Update: I did want to note that I was able to get those 16 VMs up and running that quickly through the use of the Virtual Server COM interface. The script creates difference disks for a given set of VMs, adds a user account to the system, and then sets permissions so only that user can access those VMs. I’ve also got another that can shut down the VMs and delete the associated user account.