My home lab has changed dramatically over the years – driven mostly by what I was working on at the time and the availability of hardware. I hadn’t updated my lab in quite a while so I decided it was time. I was also inspired by Chad’s post as to how cheaply I could build a server or two: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/building-a-home.html
The Hardware
Motherboard: $30; ECS NFORCE6M-A rev 3.0 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135083). This thing is sweet – capable of 32GB! Not sure I’ll ever need that much but, wait… what am I saying; of course I’ll need that extra memory some day. 
CPU: $64; CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core 2.5GHz AM2 purchased from local computer shop.
RAM: $94.50; 4GB = 2x2GB DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) 2GB Supertalent also purchased from local computer shop. I prefer to do this when the price is the same or close to NewEgg within a few bucks.
Case w/PS: $39.50; ATX RAIDMAX Elite Black ATX/Micro ATX Case 380 watt power supply also purchased from local shop. Cheap case, thin metal – you get what you pay for especially when it comes to computer cases.
Video: $0; I had 2 cheapo SiS PCI cards lying around.
HDD: $0; I’m using ESXi so local storage is not necessary.
NIC: $0; I had 4 Intel 1000MT Server NICs I repurposed from other systems I’m not using. I put 2 in each server.
USB Key: $0; I had 2x2GBers I wasn’t using.
Total Spent = $228 per server. Not bad!
I decided to go with AMD to keep the costs down. Note that the motherboard has since been delisted at NewEgg. ECS has a similar model but it’s more expensive. Now to be fair, this means that all of your storage is going to have to be on a third server. I already had a storage server in my home lab but it needed some updating:
Motherboard: $0; P4 2.6GHz – repurposed from an older PC I wasn’t using.
CPU Heatsink: $14; purchased from local computer shop. Need to replace original since the fan exhaust was directed in the wrong direction per the design of the original case.
Power Supply: $67; 580 watt from local shop.
HDD: $64; purchased another 250GB SATA3 drive to fill out my SATA RAID 4 port PCI adapter with 3 other drives.
Total Spent = $145
Hey, this is getting expensive! I sold some older systems and parts I wasn’t using on EBay to help cover some of the costs. The dominos finally stopped falling.
The Install
I installed Windows Server 2008 as the storage server OS on 2 RAID1/mirrored 160GB IDE drives. The 4 250GB HDDs are setup in a RAID5 logical drive.
For ESX, I used ESXi installed on a USB key per these instructions: http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/Knorrhane/2008/01/21/installing-esx-3i-on-usb-stick
Okay great, so now I have two ESX servers up and running and the backend storage running. Now I just need to create a datastore on the first ESX server. ESX supports Fibre, iSCSI and NFS storage types. Microsoft provides good NFS support in Windows so that seems like the easiest way to go. I installed the File Storage role in Windows Server 2008 and included the Server for NFS feature.
Snag! Microsoft no longer provides User Name Mapping for NFS – you basically need to install the Unix integration component for Active Directory. Well, my domain controller was going to be installed in a VM. I can’t create a VM w/o storage, so now what?
Stay tuned and for the answer revealed in Part 2!