I debated on getting a MacBook Pro w/Ritna as my lab machine. However, I already have a XPS 15 with pretty close spec’s to the MBP w/Ritna. So, I opted for a Dell XPS with 32GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and (2) 2TB SATA drives. I’m not disappointed.
This resource monitor is showing what has been a pretty common load I run while doing all of my data to day computing. I’m running 8 virtual machines in the background.
(1) AD Server with 1GB RAM
(1) SQL Server Running vCenter with 4GB RAM
(2) ESXi Servers with 4GB of RAM each running (1) XP workstation with 1GB of RAM each
(1) Windows Home Server running a file share and back ups for my production home network
Virtualized Geek 
any shared storage? I’m trying to do the same, but my problems starts trying to share storage among the ESXi hosts, how are you solving that?
I’ve used both Openfiler and FreeNAS. I create a VM and thin provision about 1TB of space. I normally use iSCI but NFS works fine as well.
Can the XPS 8500 allow nested VMs? My plan is to find a system where I can install VMware Workstation and inside that install ESXi. Then within the ESXi be able to create netsted VMs. I’ve had problems with other 64bit systems in allowing nested VMs eventhough I have VT enalbed in Bios. I think CPU needs EPT capability. Was wondering if anyone used XPS 8500 for this type of configuration.
I’ve ran this on my 8500 plenty of times. Works extremely well.