virtualizing XP under Linux and remote IE testing

[rpug-vYTEC60ixJUAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Ryan Pugatch)]

Dan Ritter wrote:
> 
> 32 XP VMs on one machine. Hrm. How many CPUs does the host have?
> How are the CPU loads? What kind of disk system? How are the I/O loads?
> How much RAM? Is there any swapping?
> 
> Half of my devs use Macs, and half use Linux; when we need to test IE,
> we either walk over to Windows desktops that don't do anything else or
> VNC into them. We don't need 32 of them, though.
> 
> -dsr-
> 


The box has two quad core cpus and 32GB RAM.  I/O and RAM is fine.  Xen 
is not performing well and chews up CPU.  That is definitely an issue.

We're too large to just have a few desktops scattered around, unfortunately.

To answer other questions, we can't use WINE or Crossover nor can we use 
any of those other solutions as we're required to test true IE under XP.

VMWare has been something I have been thinking of trying.  We definitely 
want to avoid having to run the VMs locally, though.

Thanks,
Ryan