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I'm not sure if those costs you listed are reasonable though



I just bought two workstation boxes that will double as our servers upon testing/pre-release and each one cost 5k (with only two cpus and two raided drives). I just recently have been contacting several local bandwidth providers and those are the costs they gave me. Resonable or not, that's what they are for me here in Ohio, USA.


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You could run several virtual servers on one machine, and handle thousands of clients.




Not really. Having 1000 virtual servers on one physical server will not increase either a) the number of clients you can host on one machine nor b) the bandwidth you need to host those clients. You are still bound by the physical limitations of the machine. Every virtual instantiation is taking some resources away from your machine, so you are already taking resources away from the simulation. And every virtual instantiation will use a "slice" of the clock so that for every time that one virtual server is updating it's process, all the rest are on stand by... I'm not quite sure how well that would work out.

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but I think I could get away with about 1k concurrent online @ 1.5 mbps. [...] and handle thousands of clients.



1.5 mbps/2000 clients = 750 bps/client. If you keep your network traffic to under 100 kilobytes per second at full client capacity, you can do that. But to acheive those numbers you have to sacrifice a lot of the simulations fidelity since sending the position of evey 50 clients around you breaks the budget... or 25 clients position plus one action from each. Heck, even 10 clients chatting among themselves will break your budget. Either buy 1.5 mbps and host 1000 clients max or triple the bandwidth to accomodate 2000 clients or more.

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would I need to use linux?



I run my servers on windows xp or 2003... so you don't NEED to use linux. As to CAN you use linux, I'm unaware of the status of 3dgs to linux translations but since 3DGS is windows native, I can't imagine that using a linux server would save you any problems and probably introduce a few new ones of it's own.


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