Prices for high-end workstation computers have dropped to all time lows of late. You can buy a machine with a Quad-core processor from both Dell and HP for not much over $500. That price typically gets you a 2.33 GHz processor, 6GB of RAM a 640GB hard drive and Windows Vista. Dell has had similar deals with essentially the same hardware plus Windows Vista. None of these deals give you the option of running Linux unless you want to just reformat the hard drive and install it yourself.
For this series of articles we set out to build a high powered workstation with the latest Linux virtualization software capable of running multiple operating systems (OS) at the same time. Our goal was to get the fastest multiple-core processor and most memory while staying close to the $500 price tag of the other off-the-shelf machines. We also wanted the ability to install at least three hard drives to help with performance issues when running multiple OSes from the same disk…
