iMac and virtualization

[Vesperal]

Greetings,

I plan to buy a 27" iMac when the new ones become available.

My job in IT currently requires a lot of lab work with virtual machines (5-8 running simultanously, so I was wondering if anyone here used their iMacs with many VMs on Parallels or Fusion.
Since the iMacs are no less powerful than any HP/Dell/homemade workstation I thought I could switch without this beeing a problem, but I wanted a power-user point of view.

Thanks

 

[Kryptik.Kode]

Buy as much RAM as you can afford to put in it. 16GB or 32GB.

 

[willieva]

I've got an 8gig c2d mbp at home that I run fedora vm's on in fusion. Each vm is configured with 2gig and one processor. With 2 vm's open everything is fine, but with 3 the system runs low on memory.

It's going to depend on what you want to do with the vm's. Running 8 vm's on 16gig would probably be a bit much for the system.