thanks guys...both your answers were great.

I'm thinking of reducing the numbers for some of the reasons you listed Steve, mainly for easier admin ,at the moment I have to guess which servers are doing what as the naming conventions are ...strange...

also whilst spreading the services across the servers reduces the risk of total failure if one vm goes down it must also increase the likelyhood of a single vm failing...(if theres 10 vms instead of 1 then surely the chances of a vm failure is tenfold)

plus if a standard 2003 server install takes up 3GB (guessing) then thats quite a large amount (60gb for 20 vms). not too much of a problem with big HDDs nowadays but then that data also has to be backed up...

and in case of a hardware failure I'd have much more work to recover all the VMs.

I think the cons outway the pros of multiple vms.