I'm more of an IT infrastructure/server person than a web site/database person so please bear with me if my questions are elementary.
I'm considering using vBulletin for two noncommercial community forums because of the excellent quality of the vBulletin-based Metroplex MINI site (www.metroplexmini.org).
Each forum would mature at perhaps 200 registered users - mostly passive readers, probably peak use would be 25 online at any given time. I estimate no more than 50 new posts per day. (All these are per forum numbers.) Inline images would be stored on the server as well - I'd say the number of images would be a bit higher than average.
I have a solid server running several VMs colocated with a hosting firm that I'm quite happy with (VirtBiz in Dallas). I'm looking at dedicating a virtual machine to support the two forums. The VM would run both the web site and the mySQL database engine; it would have 2GB RAM and the drive space would be a dedicated hardware RAID1 7200RPM SATA2 array. The host processor is a Core2 Quad running at 3GHz. Current CPU utilization on the host server is extremely low. The OS would be 32 bit Window Server 2008 (not because I consider it better than Linux, I just know it quite well, support a bunch of Windows servers already and don't have time to come up to speed on Linux).
My question is basically whether this setup would provide reasonably good performance or should I be starting with a higher level of hardware resources?
Thanks in advance for the guidance.
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