With my new lab, I ended up deciding on a two server approach to address the issues mentioned in part one – one server will purely be the “brains”, performing the virtualisation functions, while the other server will provide storage. In line with that, I ended up getting the following parts:
Virtualisation Server
- 1 x Intel i7 3930K
- 1 x Intel DX79SI motherboard
- 8 x Kingston 8GB RAM (64GB total)
- 1 x Corsair 120GB SSD
- 2 x Intel gigabit NICs
- 1 x Fractal Design Define XL case
Storage Server
- 1 x Intel i7 3820
- 1 x Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard
- 1 x Kingston 8GB RAM
- 1 x Corsair 180GB SSD
- 9 x Hitachi Ultrastar A7K3000 (2TB) HDD
- 2 x Intel gigabit NICs
- 1 x Fractcal Design Define XL case
I also bought a Netgear gigabit switch and put an Adaptec RAID controller into the storage server. The 2 additional NICs in each server are for iSCSI traffic with their own IP range.