Quote:
Originally Posted by Pringles
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Id slap ESX 6 on it, vsphere vapp, a few linux VMs for whatever i needed, and a few windows VMs for an EQ stack to screw around with. All VMs managed via salt.
This is what im doing for my current project, when I have spare time, on a beefy desktop i have under my desk. I really hate hosting anything on windows though, and it really saps my motivation to work on it.
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Pretty much this. Also, I'd encourage you to check out FreeBSD. Hyper-V 2012 R2 core edition is pretty good if you're sharp in powershell and being OS agnostic myself, I'd have to agree that there is nothing better than Active directory.
If you're using configuration management at home for practice, Salt or Chef are both excellent. You can also make a single box Hyper-V and another box VMWare to keep yourself experienced in both areas. They both work fundamentally the same and it was a fun challenge creating business continuity scenarios between the two hypervisors using configuration management to quickly replaced failed hosts (as you won't be using licensed features to allow fault tolerance/active failover).
Lastly, business class internet isn't nearly that expensive in my area and it may be worth looking into for yours. Cox is just like Comcast here in Arizona and a 50/5 connection with a single static IP is around $200/mo. The support is much, much better (Think tierIII guys, not call center guys) and the perks of same day repair for outages and prioritized routes makes a big difference for common last mile problems I never see anymore.
I used to have quite a few high end servers at home, but I've since moved everything out to private colo at a real datacenter. I have similar hardware but upgraded the CPUs to X5660s (6 core, dual CPU per motherboard, supported hyperthreading). I have the Dell C6100 blades with 4 nodes in a 2U with the same 12-bay front 3.5" drives but it allows flexibility with how you configure the disks as they don't have to be evenly distributed if you don't want them to be (one host can be a raid1 and the other can be a 10-disk raid-10 for example).
In any event, I'd recommend SSDs for your boot drives, setup a PXE image host and allow your AD server to serve pxe clients DHCP addresses. Get a vagrant installation running for quick build up/tear down of virtual machines. Check out some SDN (software defined networking) such as Vyatta (formerly open, now an official Brocade product), and setup your own storage for your media. (thinking plex, usenet auto fetcher like sabnzbd).
Brain dump of things I used to do in my home office tech closet:
Plex
Sabnzbd
OpenVPN Server/Client Mesh (to help family out of state with remote VNC)
File server (CIFS and NFS)
Hypervisors of different flavors (2 servers limits you to VMWare and/or Hyper-V, but I'd also get familiar with KVM as its very cross platform and/or CoreOS. SmartOS if you enjoy FreeBSD and Joyent now made it open source!)
Enterprise networking (Cheap cisco, Brocade/Foundry, Juniper can be had off craigslist/ebay).
TFTP server for devices such as diskless workstations, rasberry Pi nodes, VoIP phone configurations, etc
802.1q vlans, experiment with tagged and untagged interfaces if you don't already have experience with it