This is gorgeous. Fairly similar to what i'm operating with currently. Dual E5-2665 (V1), came with 64GB RAM (but i've got 128GB kit arriving tomorrow) -- the drive trays have been somewhat difficult to procure. The machine came with three (3) 600GB Seagate 10K.5 Savvio SAS disks, plus the two 800GB 12Gbps SAS SSDs i just ordered.
Gosh i'd love to have a second compute host, but hoping it'll take me a minute to outgrow this initial setup. I need to learn a bit more, because i think in order to truly dive into what i wanna learn (VSAN, storage tiering, etc.) it'll take three nodes. It's taken me ~6 months to outgrow my type 2 hypervisor... not enough time in the day.
What would you be looking to get for that (ballpark) without drives? I don't have a VIC, but working on acquiring that for future use.
FYI, this is what i ended up grabbing for trays:
800-35052-01 Cisco UCS C220 C240 C460 M2/M3/M4 SAS/SATA 2.5'' Hard Drive Tray | eBay