Thinking about building a home server/test lab

[AlfredBester]

I'm considering building a server/workstation for learning/home lab purposes. At the moment I'm still at the 'thinking about it' stage.

Build’s Name: Vidar
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows Server 2012 Standard inside Hyper-V, with additional Guest OS: Windows XP Professional and Linux (CentOS)
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230v2?
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCL+-F ?
Chassis: Antec SX-1240 (left over from an old build)
Drives: Western Digital 3TB, 2 off
RAM: 16 GB EEC (2x8GB)
Add-in Cards: n/a
Power Supply: Corsair AX750 750w 80Plus Gold PSU
Other Bits: n/a

Usage Profile: Running Windows 2012 to learn about it. I'll probably have:

1. a VM running Server 2012 that is the domain server with which I won't mess about
2. a second VM running Server 2012 that I'll use for experimenting: e.g. running IIS and SQL Server Express; writing and compiling applications that will use IIS and SQL server; configuring the server using powershell.
3. a VM running Windows XP Professional (for general usage and testing out group policy related things)
4. a couple of VMs running some variant of Linux as well as Apache web server and MySQL database.
   These will not be worked very hard. One of the Linux machines will be running Logitec's Media Server for my music.

Apart from programming I'll use the machine as a media server and to back up small amounts (<1GB) of data from my laptop.
(The machine won't contain any irreplacable data.)

Other information:
I'm a programmer by trade and I'm going to be working with Windows Server 2012 at work in the near future.
I'd like to get a head start on configuring IIS, writing applications hosted in IIS and generally
configuring and locking down what users can do in Server 2012. I may end up running a video server from
the second Windows Server 2012 VM. I will not be playing games on the machine. I'd like to be
able to log in remotely. The machine will not be running 24/7 but I'd like to keep it as quiet as
possible and have minimal power consumption.

Any thoughts or suggestions regarding the build would be appreciated.

I'm not sure which E3 processor to go for. If I went with a E3-1230 V2 does the machine specs as outlined
above have enough grunt to be able to cope with running the following VMs at the same time and be
reasonably responsive: VMs #1, #2, #3 and at least one lightly loaded linux VM?

Would I be better going for a workstation motherboard rather than a server motherboard?

 

[Jeggs101]

You should be fine with the server board. Only question is can you get 32GB instead of 16GB? Hyper-V cannot over provision with Linux guests.

If you are a programmer would bet you could find some way to make the $100 or so difference -- and upgrade to e3-1270v2 --
http://forums.servethehome.com/soft...tandard-web-server-benchmark-open-source.html

 

[badatSAS]

That's a lot of power supply for the setup you have spec'd out. You're looking at ~100 watts, which is 13% load, 80plus certification only tests down to 20% load (150 watts).

If you already have it, and don't have a higher power machine to put it on - it will work fine, but i wouldn't buy it for this build, ideally around a 300 watt 80plus Platinum would be the most efficient without losing much headroom to grow a little

 

[AlfredBester]

Thanks for the information.
I'm not sure if I'll go for a E3-1270 v2 - it's much more expensive than the E3-1230 v2 and the E3-1240 v2 and doesn't appear to give a significant performance boost according to the benchmarks information on this and other sites. I think I'd rather spend the extra money on more RAM.
Any suggestions for for 300 watt 80plus Platinum power supplies?