Questions for those of you building out the lab described in the 70-462 book:

Do you have several physical servers that you're building this on, or are you all invested in high-end workstations that ran run multiple VMs?

My situation: My current home computer (4-5 years old or so) has Windows 7 64-bit with the maximum 4GB RAM the motherboard will accomodate. I had been running a VM of Server 2008 (32-bit - my processor doesn't support 64-bit virtualization) with an instance of SQL Server interacting with an instance of SQL Server Developer Edition on my Host Windows 7 OS. The VM is set to 2GB of RAM as I felt it would be too slow with anything less. Well between the VM, Outlook, SSMS and anything else I was running, my computer occasionally ran out of RAM, started paging and everything slowed to a crawl.

My solution was to set up a VM on my wife's computer (6GB of RAM) running Server 2008 R2 and use a SQL instance running there. But she complains I make her computer run slow, even though the VM is set to 2GB, and I'm still limited to 2 SQL instances at one time.

I'm considering investing $1,000 or so in a new i7 12GB monster workstation, which I figure could run multiple Server 2008 R2 VMs simultaniously. This would also free up my present computer to be rebuilt as a physical 2008 R2 server for another instance.

Is this what I need to do? Or can I run my VMs with less RAM?

On a related note, does a 2008 Server Core installation run better with less RAM than the regular version due a lack of the Windows GUI and other features? I haven't done this install yet. Is it worth the time then? Can it be managed via RDP or do you need to be at the phuysical (or VM) console?