Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of PC hardware.  After building a couple Windows Media Centers, and constantly upgrading them, I found myself with enough parts for a rather powerful home server:

·         Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86Mhz

·         4GB RAM

·         (3) SATA hard drives ranging in size from 120GB to 500GB

What I envisioned was a centralized server built to meet the following requirements:

·         Manage backups of my notebooks, and media centers

·         Act as a print server

·         Web/ftp server

·         SQL server

·         Domain controller

·         File server

It didn’t have to do all these things, but it would be nice.  First I looked at Windows Home Server.  I was a beta tester for this product and it was a nice all in one package that met my backup, fileserver, and print server needs.

However, I’m a geek and it didn’t seem powerful enough for me.   I then tried Ubuntu Server.  This could meet most of my needs, but for all its power sometimes it’s just nice to go with the familiar windows GUI.  Because with Linux I find myself searching forums for help far too often, and for things that should be simple (ie. Connecting to a network, installing video drivers, etc…)

Then as a user of VMware workstation, I thought to look into server virtualization.  Unlike the Workstation version, VMware offers a FREE server version (VMware Server).

Now with VMware Server I have a setup that looks like this:

·         Windows Server 2003 (Host OS) – File Server, FTP/IIS, Backup server

o   Windows 2003 (Guest OS) – Domain controller

o   Windows 2003 (Guest OS) – Development Server (i.e. Visual Studio, SQL, IIS, SharePoint Services)

o   Ubuntu Server (Guest OS) – Subversion server

In the end I have 4 servers on a single physical box and I couldn’t be more satisfied.