1 powerfull or 2 less power machines for labs

Hi all,

Been reading what feels like the whole internet for the past 3 days trying to get a good feel.

I need to learn a new product for my job and it involves an application running on Oracle and/or MSSQL.

I have a quad core intel [email protected] with 8GB RAM. The HDD is a SATA 1.5 TB no raid or anything.

I have ESXi running on it with one Windows 2008R2 vm with this app and MSSQL2008 but the performance isnt great. The memory is near paging and the HDD light is nearly always on.

So I need to spend. Now I probably have approx £1000. Should I build one large box with dual XEON processors with 16GB RAM and try and find a good HDD card with Raid 10 or shall I build 2 simlilar specs as what I have and split the app and db out.

thanks for your time guys
Kind regards
Danny