Personal PC for VM spec question

  • Good evening!

    Let me start by saying that I'm not sure if I put this in the right section of the site, so my apologies if I got it wrong.

    So at my job, I'm trying to position myself to be more of a DBA and less of a general Systems admin. I spoke with my boss about this and he approved, he gave me a lab at work to play with. Now, unfortunately, I don't have free reign over the lab, as it's all on the same Domain, etc., as our production environment.

    I have no issue with this and I was actually thinking of building out a PC at home to use as a test server. I already have a TechNet subscription that will cover the licensing. I am just stumped on the hardware, as the last time that I built a PC was probably when the Athlon 64 was brand new, lol.

    Can anyone provide me with suggestions? I do know that I am looking to get 24GB of ram on this box, as I will end up having at least 5 VM's that I know of powered on most of the time (1xAD, 2X Server 2008 r2 w/SQL 2008r2, 2x Server 2012 w/SQL 2012) running as well as my main OS install.

    Any suggestions would be appreciated, I am not tied to a specific architecture.

    Thanks for putting up with the long post, Thanks for feedback.

  • Good question.

    The web showed some motherboard that support 32 GB ram and there are 8 gb ram modules available; may 2012 article[/url]. Processor of preference I7.

    Or perhaps a secondhand entry level server.

  • Thanks so much for the link!

  • If you don't mind build it yourself, I put one together a couple years ago based around a Xeon 5603 CPU. Used a Supermicro board, takes up to 24GB RAM (6x 4GB) Works fine for me, currently hosting (with only 12GB, bought another 12GB but haven't put it in yet):

    1x Domain Controller

    2x SQL2012 Servers (set up to play with Always On)

    I had a couple others, but for now have them off.

    Jason

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