After running my ESX test enviroment with a single core CPU and one harddrive, for about two months, I desided that it was time to upgrade it. It was running a bit slow.
Since my motherboard supported dualcore CPU’s I bought a Athlon 64 X2 4200+ for about $200,00.
Also wanting to boost the disk IO i bought three 160GB Samsung SpinPoint S166 (This is just a test enviroment).
After adding the new hardware and reinstalling ESX 3.0.1 I was ready to see the difference, and what a difference it was.
Now the system runs smoothly and without CPU or disk IO bottlenecks.
I therefore recommend not running ESX with only one single core CPU.
You can see my hardware list and configuration here.
A. Mikkelsen