Building a Virtual Home Server

I’m in the process of moving my home office from the 2nd floor mezzanine to the basement, as we’re adding a room to the house. So this is the right time to make some networking and computing decision.

Some of the changes I’ll be bringing to my computing environment are: Change my desk from a simple and indestructible oak IKEA work table to a workstation type surface (IKEA as well). This one has an additional shelf for my external hard drives and networking gear.

Possibly replacing my iMac G4 1 Ghz 17′ to a more powerful iMac Dual Core 2 Ghz 20′. This would triple my internal HDD space, more than double the CPU performance and provide me with USB 2.0 and Bluetooth, which I currently lack (respectively handy for filling my iPod faster and Tréo 650 sync)

Network the whole house with Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling, so I can hook up with Gigabit speed from any room in the house. When the kids grow up, having wired connectivity would make a lot of sense.

But the one thing that I’ve been looking at is having some kind of file server / dev server available to me from both home and internet (using vpn/ssh/vnc).I’ve been going back and forth on this one since I’d love to run VMware Server on a fat box with plenty of RAM to have a few environments running, but at the same time, it might be so much cheaper to simply have a linux box with all the req. services running. Just more problems if something goes south…

I’ve also given some thought to getting a Mac Mini to act as a server, but I think I could be constrained in terms of HDD space, if I want to use this server as a backup and file server. Unless I added external firewire drives, but it could get messy and complicated.

Finally, my dream would definitely to have a small 19′ rack enclosure to put a 1U or 2U server, switch, router, wifi and some storage blades, but THAT would probably be too costly to fit into my meagre budget