[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Jim Holtzman] 

Continuing the saga of virtualizing EBS at home.

Step 1: Set a budget for dating EBS. This is coming out of my pocket so I set a hard limit of $2000. Done.

Step 2: Determine hardware requirements. I read the following:

• "Choose a virtual configuration" - EBS team's suggested hardware guidance. Very useful information.
• "EBS Virtualized – Step by Step – Part 2 – Hardware Sizing", by Nicholas King. Hardware recommendations for virtualizing EBS. This is one of a 6-part thread where Nick describes installing EBS on a single server. I'll be leveraging this thread a lot. Thanks, Nick!

I'm going to aim for the following: 16GB RAM, 4 fast hard drives (10k RPM), two quad-core procs (64-bit, of course), two NICS. Ambitious. Let's see what I find.

Pre-built server
I looked at several vendors and quickly determined it was not possible to meet budget with a pre-built machine. Not even close. Maybe this date is going nowhere fast.

DIY server
A do-it-yourself server just might keep things moving. I've built desktops before. Not servers. I'll give it a shot. Here's my list of hardware priced out:

• Server case: $174 - with 650-Watt power supply.
• Motherboard: $290 - supports dual quad-core procs, SAS drives, 2 NICS, maximum 32GB RAM.
• Quad-core Processor: $227 x 2 = $454.
• RAM: $360 - 16 GB (2 x 2GB) x 4.
• Hard drives: $180 x 4 = $720 - 147GB, 15K RPM, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
• Video card: $25 - cheapest I could find. Who needs fancy video on a server? Almost forgot to order until I reviewed the motherboard specs and found no built-in video. Lucky catch.
• DVD RW drive: $22 - read-write in-case I need to write something quickly to be available via the virtual DVD.
• Floppy drive: $7 - just in case I need it for bios flash or virtual machine purposes. Probably a waste of money.
• Shipping: $27.
  

Total: $2,079 - over budget. Cut out the second quad-core proc.

New total: $1,852. The date is progressing.

I placed the order. Hope I didn't forget something important. You'll let me know, right?

Note: I'm not meeting all the hardware requirements suggested by the EBS team. I don't have a RAID set. I don't have a second processor. Consider this a test environment setup.