[olug] Looking for a larger server, not necessiarly new.

[Aric Aasgaard]

You can do what I am doing and get a Dell C6100 XS23-TY3 off eBay.   It is a good platform for playing with virtualization.  I put cheap 10G mezzanine cards in the nodes with short cheap twinax sfp+ patch cables.  I made one node FreeNAS, one pfSense, and two Xenserver.  I got 160GB WD velociraptor drives for about $10 each when looking for SSD to 3.5 adapters for mirrored node boot drives and or MSSQL log files.  I got 6, 5TB 7200RPM 128MB cache Toshiba desktop drives for $140 each for RAIDZ2 on the FreeNAS.  I put 48GB of RAM in each node for a total of 192GB.  I plan on using a reverse proxy http cache on the pfSense node.  I probably have about $2000 into it.  .........but hey education, you could easily spend that in a year at a college bookstore.  I planned to put it in a cheap 2U colo spot, it is wired up without a switch.  If you just want one to play with at your home you can probably just get a C1100 for much less.  I have a C1100 currently in production running Xenserver with over a year of uptime.