Yup, it’s that time of the year again. I’ll just ignore that the financial situation of this planet is going down the crapper at top speed and will invest a substantial amount of $$$ into a new Linux server. Main requirements:

• quiet. The box is standing under my desk, and I do not want to be able to hear it.
• plenty of storage. A couple of 1TB drives should take care of that.
• failover. The aforementioned drives will be configured as… RAID5? RAID10? Not sure yet…
• powerful enough to run several VM guests at the same time, so a good quad core CPU & plenty of RAM.

I think I have finally worked out the components line-up:

These parts should add up to a pretty cool beast…
The OS will most likely be (Gentoo) Linux with VMware, VirtualBox or KVM. Both the new releases of VMware and VirtualBox look promising, but I still lean towards KVM… Perhaps www.virtualmachineforums.info can shed some light on it for me…