It&#x27;s really a matter of deciding whether you want to buy prebuilt or just build it yourself.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I find the former option is much better if you intend on having a large number of similarly spec-ed servers (since the vendor will have nice management tools designed to make your life easy) and the latter option is much better if you need very specific configurations (eg; bleeding-edge hardware) or you&#x27;re reasonably competent at IT and want to save $$.<p>What&#x27;s your budget?<p>If &lt; $4k you&#x27;ll want to go dual socket. Xeon E5&#x27;s are topping out at 22 cores per socket nowadays. You&#x27;ll find the price sweetspot around 12 cores&#x2F;socket.<p>If &gt; $5k you can go for the Xeon E5-4xxx series (which if you want to wait for Q2&#x27;16 are getting a slight speed bump) in the V4 models. You&#x27;ll get up to 18 cores&#x2F;socket but the price sweetspot is still around 12 cores&#x2F;socket (gives you 96 logical threads in linux).<p>Most decent server motherboards for these processors will support 512GB+ DDR4 ECC RAM. Again, supermicro is a good bet. Just make sure it&#x27;s a server and not workstation motherboard (it should have dedicated IPMI). If you&#x27;re planning on running something storage intensive, spring for a MOBO with built-in SAS adapter.<p>Then you&#x27;ll be better off dockerizing your application instead of spinning up a bunch of VM&#x27;s. Why? You get easy shared access to disks, much lower overhead, you can easily use a cloud builder like quay.io, and if you want to deploy to AWS or your own server your code is guaranteed to run identically.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I currently run highly networking and CPU bound trading programs in a containerized environment and it&#x27;s been wonderful. Much easier than VM&#x27;s and much lower overhead. Plus you can mess with the networking to your heart&#x27;s content (made easy by using pipework).