Vmsrv

Philosophy

The Skullspace virtual machine service (vmsrv) is offered to members as a means to share the benifits of best-available hardware.

"Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total."

As such, we operating a virtual machine service (vmsrv) to support two styles of computing:

Interactive computing -- temporary bursts of high resource use (IO/CPU/memory) by a single user for the purpose of "figuring stuff out", "getting stuff done", "hacking", etc. with the ethic of ensuring resources are freed when not in use. "Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!"
General service computing -- always up and running services with reasonable IO, CPU, and memory use that doesn't impair the above. (services with intense all the time resource requirements should be operated on dedicated servers)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 @ 2.33G (does not have VT extensions!)
Gigabyte-EP45-UD3L motherboard
2x2G (4G) of DDR2 RAM in dual channel configuration, can upgraded to 4x4G (16G)
4X1TB SATA hard drives in RAID 10 configuration
Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 amd64 host operating system
LVM block layer, RAID10 is the sole physical volume for the sole volume group (vmsrv). Logical volumes to be created and extended from this volume group as needed

If you want to run a Linux-based x86_64 or x86 based guest, you should consider the performance benifits of running it on vmsrv as a Linux Container (LXC), which is wiki:Operating_system-level_virtualization Operating system-level virtualization