HI,

I'm going to build my home LAB. For this purpose I would like to setup a small and quiet home server. The challenge is, to choose the right components as per bellow requirements:
1. Handle around 12VM (dns,backup,gpg,routing/networking,3xjava/tomcat,2xwebservers,active-directory,2other appservers)
2. Able to handle automatic backup traffic from 5 different PCs (less than 500M/daily).
3. Perfectly will be if bellow example config, will fit into this Case (or similar): http://www.fractal-design.com/home/p...node-304-black
4. Example config:
- 24G RAM
- 8/16cores with virtualization support
- quiet fans/coolers
- 4x2TB HDD
- 1x250M SSD


Please let me know your feelings and suggestions..

Thanks!

I'm certainly no expert in this area, but it seems to me that the key question is how much RAM you wish to devote to each VM and what virtualizer you intend to use, especially if you wish all those VMs to run concurrently.

Currently I am making some research on what virtualization platform use there. I would like to go with Vmware, but I am not sure if I found some cheap license. I heard that there is a free one for homeLAB up to 10VMs.. need to validate it. But it's not a topic.

For RAM, I suppose that 4x8G should will be the best, I am more interested with CPU, to have at least 8cores, and mainboard which will fit into small case, like this which I send..

This topic is to get help with valid hardware choice.

I'm by no means an expert, as I said. I've use VirtualBox to distro-hop, but I've never attempted to do anything on the scale you're considering. Nevertheless, I'm still opening my big mouth: Rather than looking at something proprietary, I'm going to suggest that you take a look at KVM. I've heard good things about it.

Beyond that, your question is well out of my league and I'll shut up now.

Thanks for your comments frankbell!
KVM seems to be a great option as well, especially when it's OSS
My worst concerns are CPU and mainboard, and what coolers/power supply to use to be quite quiet.

grzeslaw,

These links may be of use:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/23/vms_compared/

http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/vsphere-hypervisor/

http://www.virten.net/2015/03/free-e...d-limitations/

When I was using Vmware it was somewhat limited on hardware it supported so it limited your options.
Likewise that node304 case being miniitx will limit you some as the miniitx boards are limited in expandability, you'll have trouble finding one that supports a lot of RAM.
I'm moving toward a hybird approach, using a couple Raspberry Pi's for smaller things such as my time/dns/etc server, file server with all the .iso's of the OS and any other software to install. This offloaded some stuff from my VM server, though I still need to rebuild my vm box.

Thx guys, but I am still looking for some specific propositions of the hardware configuration.. If you can't purpose anything what can be done from scratch - maybe you can recommend some complete setup from any of known manufacturers like Dell/HP?