After a conversation with Travis recently about the home lab environment he built for hosting virtual machines, I got a serious itch to build a new machine myself. With RAM prices as low as they are, it’s actually not too expensive to put together a machine that can easily host eight VMs simultaneously with perfectly adequate performance. This makes SharePoint development a lot easier since you can set up a full blown MOSS environment that you have complete control over without having to run everything on your laptop.
Here are the specs for anyone who’s interested:
- Case: APEVIA X-QPACK2-NW-BK Small, quiet, and a 500 Watt Power Supply. This is a Micro-ATX, so it does limit your motherboard selection. I wanted onboard video to cut down on the price anyway since I’m only ever going to RDP into this box.
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-G33M-DS2R Supports 8GB of RAM and has 6 SATA on-board. Don’t try to skimp on your MB… Get a solid name brand.
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 I always buy procs right at the last price break. Go as fast as you can without paying the bleeding-edge premium.
- RAM: G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400). 8 GIG of RAM for $400? J
- Drives: 160 GB, 7200 RPM Seagate Barracudas Just like the Proc, go as big and fast as you can before they start to get expensive. I got 4 of these: 1 for my host OS and then 1 for presentation tier VMs, 1 for middle tier VMs and 1 for data tier VMs. This should keep the IO contention at a minimum.
That’s pretty much it. Throw in a CD-ROM so that you can install your host OS (or just borrow a CD-ROM from another machine temporarily.) The grand total was just over $1000. For me, running 8 VMs at once and seeing the below makes it all worthwhile.
