SBS 2011 and ESXi

mdgm wrote:
The cost. For one server it can be hard to justify the cost of virtualising. When you have multiple VMs to run it starts to become quite attractive.

Yeah I hear you but it has it's advantages, the one major thing I like is the restore time, it's basically hardware independent, if you have a hardware failure I could almost through any supported hardware to get them back up as fast as possible. I already have my build pretty much spec'd out and it's no more than the cost of one of the laptop's I just bought for one of my users. So for my build I'm right at around $1200 (us), for the server not including my readynas 6 and drives. I was going to do the Nas anyway so that part would be a push, even if I went internal raid, it's cheaper but not by a whole lot since I would still need the same number of drives, the controller card would be cheaper than the NAS but then It's less flexible. So for ~$1200 this is what I have:

3u rack case
SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-F G34 AMD M/B
amd Magny Cour 2.0G 8 core processor
G34 CPU cooler
32G Kingston ECC registered Memory
Antec 380 Power supply
4bay hot swap 2.5 HDD cage
Intel 40G SSD
antec 380W Power supply

For about $250 more supermicro makes a 1ru server chassis system just for this motherboard, all ready to go, just add memory, cpu and drives...I still may go with it... http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/ ... 2G-MTF.cfm

I use Supermicro for almost all of my server builds, they make good stuff and have good support. The cool thing about the g34 boards is that they are supposed to stay compatible with the new 16 core bulldozer lines that are coming out...so one should be able to get a long life out of it...just thought I'd pass that along..:)