New lab

[AlphaCS]

Okay I need to set a new lab to help studying for my MCSE 2012 exam. I was running most of my labs from my workstation which is running a sandy i5, 16gb ram, and 1 tb sata. I was thinking of adding an SSD to help run multiple machines inside VMware.

Now I'm thinking another route. I also need to add NAS for my home storage so I'm going to knock out two birds with one stone.

So I can get a HP microserver g8 and max the ram out to 16gb. This little box is pretty neat and packs a few things like dual nics. So this would be my NAS for my home storage as well as my Lab VMware machines.

Or I can go all out and grab one Dell c1100 from ebay. Much more robust server for a great price. Just may be a tad overkill and I feel like at the end of the day I'm not sure I want this thing running 24/7 serving as my NAS. '

So with my plans and that said what do you guys think? Any input would be great,

 

[SpaceSquad]

So I can get a HP microserver g8 and max the ram out to 16gb. This little box is pretty neat and packs a few things like dual nics. So this would be my NAS for my home storage as well as my Lab VMware machines.

Those are really popular and I agree - a nice little NAS box. However, you could go the route I went as well and get a:

Cheapish m-itx board+cpu - There are many others similar...E-series, Celerons, Atoms, whatever.

Then just add a suitable case...I got an 8-bay micro tower. Throw the HDDs in there and pop in a $30 Intel Pro1000 NIC. My NAS draws ~25W idle running an MSI e350 board. No real need for RAID as you can just use FreeNAS with a ZFS pool instead (snapshots!).

I'm not sure I want this thing running 24/7 serving as my NAS.

True - go small!

 

[mason]

We use the Hp Microservers alot and they are fantastic.

Nice machines for the money.

I am in the the middle of testing a few things out with essentials 2012 and i am using a microserver and 5 client vmwares on my pc.

 

[AlphaCS]

Which ones are you using? I just installed server 2012 data center on my main box. Going to give it a spin. I'm still trying to decide on my server/nas route.