>
> If you don't plan to buy a Hardware Management Console (HMC) to control
> the partitioning of resources, your choices will be more limited...
>
> -Chris

Actually with IVM you should be ok. But you would want to make sure
that whatever HW you get is Micro-Partitioning and Virtual I/O Server
Capable (and enabled). With IVM, VIO and Micro-Partitioning you could
setup an LPAR environment where you could run multiple AIX or RHEL/
SUSE partitions simultaneously without an HMC and with minimal
Physical HW, i.e 1 NIC and one or two HD's. I would think that a 505
or 510 would be fine for that sort of setup.

I run a similar setup on a p510 with 4 dev environments (all AIX
though)...Dual proc w/ 16GB of RAM but I do have an HMC so I've never
actually used IVM.
of course I don't have any sort of heavy load on these guys, just a
couple of developers accessing DB2

Good luck, sounds like fun.