I used to spend lots of time looking over the specs published at http://www.sharkeyextreme.com for gaming PCs to dream about my desired workstation. Over time I got busy and that effort fell by the wayside. Now it seems that I am dreaming about a new server. It seems I am always exceeding the capabilities of my laptop and need some extra horsepower. Fortunately I can build a pretty powerful box for a relatively modest sum of money. (Well, modest to what I see vendors selling servers for!) I thought I would share with others what I would do today if I were building a server.
My server needs are pretty intense as I want to be able to host a complete enterprise POC environment. That means I need to run a database, several application servers, security and identity management, web servers, and of course a source code control system. I will also occasionally need to run applications like Siebel CRM to test out integration. Running all this is really not practical on a single piece of hardware. Buying multiple boxes is an option but it takes more space and can be a bit of a pain. So I am going to take advantage of virtual machine technology. I want to use Oracle VM but I cana??t ignore how many people run VMWare. Since this is *my* box, my choice of VM technology is still undecided.
Fortunately the components to build a dual quad core system are fairly available to purchase. In fact, I was able to get all of the components for this build from http://www.newegg.com. They are a great company to buy from although you can shop around for better prices on some components. Their great customer service though is hard to replace.
Below you will find a list of the components I would use to build a server today. Comments and suggestions are welcome and part of why I posted this in the first place!
