Explaination from

A new installation of a VMWare machine can be done by installing an ready image - here is an example one of a debian minimal that will be o.k. for us: http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/#debian5.0 (please dont install it, its just an example). All we need afterwards is for them to set up the IP and give us ssh access from the outside, we will finish the installation from there on.

Minimal parameters for the virtual machine: minimum 2 (best 8) cpu cores, @~ 2Ghz or so, minimum 4 (best 16) Gb of ram, minimum 200GB (best 2TB, and it will increase) of hdd space available.

Backup - generally a VMware installation can be easily backed up as a whole. Our system, with an empty database (e,g, freshly installed) should  use no more than 300mb, and then on top of that, whatever ammount of files they actually will use. So our proposal would be to handle the backup of the whole VMware installation, daily to a single specfic location (erasing the old backup); weekly to another location (keeping some weeks backwards) and monthly (keeping some months backwards). In addition, we can offer the incremental backup that we do normally for other clients, where we would need another linux machine where the backup is stored - that can be one of our own backup servers (if client agrees), or they can provide another VMware at another location than the main server, where we wil then do the backup.

RAID and the security/stability of the machine(s) where the VMWare is running on, is in that scenario a responsibility of the client's administrators.