ESXI home server

[Cooners]

Hi

I'm trying to work out the best (and cheapest) way to build an esxi server at home. I will want to run 2 or 3 VM's from this and leave it on all day.
One will run Server 2008 with DHCP, DNS, etc
One will be set up as some sort of NAS box used mainly for streaming media
One will proberley have Ubuntu on it for downloading

Also will proberley have one of them running VPN and maybe backup documents from mine and my girlfriends PC's (nothing much just our photos, music etc)

Half the point of this is to learn about things like server 2008 and also to have an upgradeable NAS box and VPN accesable at all times.

I need it to be energy efficent as I will want to leave it on all day without making to much impact on the leccy bill and also would like at least 4 HHD slots but don't want it to big (I would like to keep it under the desk)

Any Ideas?

Many Thanks

 

[Cooners]

Thanks for the advice, I gotta admit I have been looking at the HP microservers, but as Spooter has said the CPU is very low powered, would it be able to cope running three VM's?

 

[Cooners]

OK I think I'll go for the hp microserver, I'll stick 8gb of RAM in it and a couple of 2TB drives (when they stop charging the earth for them) for storage and use the 250gb drive for the vm's. So I was thinking of using windows server 2008 on one vm to be a domain controller and run dhcp, dns and vpn, the second vm will be for NAS and streaming media to my xboxs, I was thinking either freeNAS, WHS or ubuntu for this, and lastly one vm will just be a standard OS purely for downloading via Usenet and bit torrent, I was thinking either windows 7 or ubuntu. Does that sounds OK and what options would be best considering the limited cpu, I don't have much experience with Linux but if it would make this all more viable then I guess it would give me a reason to learn.