NAS Setup?

[Xelene]

So I inherited a couple of decent servers as part of my severance package, a Dell 2970 (2 quad Opterons, 16GB, 6 SAS/SATA) and a Dell 1950 (2 quad Xeon 16GB). I'm planning on selling some of the RAM and 5 146 SAS drives and putting 6 500GB RE SATA drive into the 2970.

So the question is this; I want to run VM (Xen or VMWare) on the 1950 blade (and maybe the 2970 but it's different architecture. I can run gigabit over a dedicated gigabit switch for this (and expansion to more blades later perhaps.) What are my options software wise? FWIW the 2970 has a Perc 6 controller I think.

Edit: Obviously a Software solution to allow SAN would also be of interest, just aware the 2970 isad overkill for *only* fileserving!

 

[ecksmen]

ESXi 4.1 on 2GB usb stick. RAID the local disks and configure how you like (speed va capacity vs redundancy) and install your guest OS(s). If you want to cluster you'll need vCenter and you'll end up spending money.

 

[Xelene]

ESXi 4.1 on 2GB usb stick. RAID the local disks and configure how you like (speed va capacity vs redundancy) and install your guest OS(s). If you want to cluster you'll need vCenter and you'll end up spending money.

Not what I asked sorry. Have 1 machine with 2-2.5 TB array. How do I share as SAN / NAS , ideally letting it host guest OS also. Software budget is somewhere between none and minimal.