[mdlug] hypervisor/vm

[Norman]

   David, I have used VMWare workstation, VM ESXi5, Centos kvm and
Oracle Virtualbox extensively. In your situation, you might want to try
VMWare workstation ($250), this allows you to install multiple VMs on
the same Windows workstation, you can also setup network through NAT or
Bridged Network. I used bridged network so that all VMs are under the
same subnet (the host and VMs can see each other), these VMs and the
host machine behave just they are physically machines next to each
other, with a few limitations:
1). You can use the USB of the virtual machine, also VMtools allow you
to install video card, etc, but anything connected to the VMs with USB
have to be constantly switched between host and VM
2). You can't do graphic intensive jobs such as HD video editing.
3). All these machines' availability/reliability are dependent on the
host machine, so you really want to run enterprise Virtualization, you
would have to use RHEV or VMWare ESXi, they're expensive, the hypervisor
itself is bare-bone Linux, VMs need to be administered remotely.

   You can also run Oracle Virtualbox on Windows, Linux or Mac, it's
slightly less powerful than VMWare, and I have not figured out how to
put VMs & host on the same subnet. In my experience, the driver support
not as good as VMWare. 

   My primary workstation is a Windows 7 Dell, with 6-core AMD, 16G
memory, I can run 3-4 VMs simultaneously, each VM with 2-core and 2G
memory. (I don't know how the math works when it comes to the number of
cores)

   All of them would allow you to run multiple VMs simultaneously.