Thanks lol, if you scour ebay for long enough you can find some amazing deals
Anyways, from what I can tell, the lack of performance in the VMs (and single threaded stuff in general) is due to the fact that each opteron 6172 is basically two phenom X6's strapped onto one chip, but clocked significantly slower. I've looked for other bottlenecks, but the CPUs seem to be the lowest common denominator. The storage for the VMs is a RAID 0 array of 7200RPM HDDs that gets read speeds of ~500MB/s, so storage isn't the problem (especialy since the VMs don't do much random reading/writing), and ram definitely isnt the issue (2-4GB per machine, ram usage is below 50% on all of the VMs), so I'm left with the CPU. The main question is this thread is how much will I gain in terms of CPU performance from an upgrade to Interlagos (bulldozer) opterons.