I am planning for building an ESXi server that will host more than 4 virual Win2003 servers and trying to work out what is the best solution in term of hard ware configuration.

CPU

2 Core 2 Duo 3.3 GHz ($339 AUD) or 2 Core 2 Quad 2.6 GHz ($359 AUD)

My question is which one is better, the faster clock speed 4 cores or the slower 8 cores.

Hard disks

With 2 HD, should I separate them into 2 datastores or all in one with RAID 0.