Newbie question - Cacti - how should I size my box?

[stahlawhile]

Newbie question - I am installing Cacti/RRD/mySQL/Apache and whatever else so that I can begin monitoring my trends and someday when asked "why do we need this new box" - I'll be able to point and say - "here's why."

Until then though I have no way to know how big to size the box I'm going to use for this tool Need some advice to kickstart me here.

I'm thinking I'm going to start small and go up as I need to. The whole idea here is NOT to spend a gazillion dollars on anything till I've exhausted smaller/cheaper options unless I'm ADVISED otherwise ahead of time. So I was going to ask my VMware gurus for a Windows instance with X amount of space. I'm going to be keeping an eye on about:

150 Server instances (Solaris, linux, aix, windows, citrix, vmware, yadda yadda yadda)
Associate networking pieces

Should I ask him for a Windows 8 or Windows 03 instance? How much beef do I need in cpu's, memory and hard disk?

Give me something to start with so I don't fail out of the gate or struggle through process trying to make progress.

Any help is very much appreciated!
P@ Stahl
stahlawhile@gmail.com

[TheWitness]

Any reasonable quad core box will do, running RHEL or some other variant of Linux of course. I prefer to place the RRDfiles on separate physical disks from the OS and database. However, 150 hosts is pretty small. If you use SSD and if with raid, including trim support, you might get away with only a single disk.

I don't use Windows for this stuff, although, ten years ago, I did.

TheWitness