Software config is another nightmare scenario all together......

It depends on how you do it. If you are investing in a "garden", as you put it. Invest in VMware and a good router/nics to gang them together VSphere 6 will support up to 128 cpus per Virtual Machine. Keep in mind you are going to turn off hyperthreading, etc...

You can take an entire stack of blades and run them as a single machine. If you hit the cpu or core cap on an op system, you can just run two VM's etc. You can run as many as you want too, but it is a diminishing return.

The Plus to VMware is that you can create servers with huge amounts of pooled memory and cpus.

Windows 7 on more cores than any single or dual cpu processor machine can possibly have flat out screams.

Just keep in mind that it does violate a few Eula's....

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