You may just want to "borrow" a VM Host for a period of time. We run a large number of VMs which are suitable for many things. However, for SAS VA we are taking the approach that they are more equivalent to a VM Host than a VM guest. The SAS VA minimum spec is 256GB RAM and 16 cores. You could try it in less, and the Cores*8=# of GB RAM rule of thumb would still apply. We did a SAS VA Demo server of a single 16 core 256GB RAM with a 250GB SSD drive and ran out of disk space and have more disks on order (900GB more disk, though SAS had originally spec'd a 600GB drive for us and SSD is something we did in a pinch with an available server, and not something that anyone recommended for SAS VA). This is primarily for the SAS Work area that some complex jobs were running. In Demo we are at about 50% of memory in use and very low CPU with a chunk of data loaded and a dozen users. The Web server overhead appears to be about 30GB steady state, though at first I thought it bumped up to about 50GB RAM but haven't seen that since. You could give it a try on lower CPU/RAM machine/VM Host equivalent in an "unsupported" configuration if that helps to get your feet wet, but depending on use and memory requirements you'll want to get bigger faster. We are building much bigger clusters of 4 and 6 servers for test and production and going to 20core/320GB memory and 900GB starting disk on each node. P.S. We were also evicted from our VM environment for running 15X the disk IO of the next busiest VM guest. We have gone physical for our SAS BI environments. ... View more