I recently upgraded my home  clone server  by purchasing a new Motherboard, i7 920
quad core  processor, 12 GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive. Total cost about $800. I kept
the existing 250GB drive as my boot drive. I am currently running a 7 server
farm on the box using VMWare to emulate a DMZ – Firewall – Internal Network
with sharepoint  and CRM. Memory consumption is at about 50%. It’s the best
$800 I ever spent. I always develop in a Virtual environment. I run all this
in a native Windows 7 environment installed on the 250GB drive.

In addition, I have also configured a Boot to VHD partition with Server 2008 r2
in it. When I boot into that VHD partition I can run Hyper-V images. (Please
note that you normally can’t run Hyper-V from inside an image, but boot to VHD
is viewed by the system  as a native partition, not virtualization, so Hyper-V
works.)

Not sure how standard Dell cases are nowadays, but I would investigate upgrading
the components necessary rather than buying a whole new server.

thanks for the tip about boot to VHD; I didn't know that was
viewed as the host OS.

..and don't skimp on the RAM. 8GB minimum, get as much as your budget will
allow. Stick with i7 CPUs if at all possible as well - many pluses for
virtualization.

The motherboard I got will go to 24GB. So far I've put in 3-4GB sticks. 12
GB is fine for now. I will probably build out to the full 24GB when I get
some more cash. Always try to buy the biggest RAM chips your board will
hold, and leave yourself room to fill it up later if you can't afford to
right now.

How are you confugirng the ram on your guests? Are you overstacking , I
assume?

In this case with 12 GB to play with I'm just giving them what they need. Two
DCs at 512KB each, one ISA server  at 1GB, 2 SQL servers at 1GB, 1 sharepoint  at
3 GB, 1 CRM at 2GB. 10 GB out of 12 in use when they are all up and running
hard.

I've been meaning to write that up as a blog post one of these days. It is
really helpful since you can no longer install both VMware and Hyper-v on
the same machine.

You are going to need to run a 64bit OS in order to use 2010, so you will need a
64-bit processor and at least 4GB of RAM (Sometimes 64-bit OS's run slower if
you have less than 3 GB's of Ram)

I use VMware to manage my home  network, but I only have 4 servers, DC,
SharePoint, F&P, and Generic. I also use snapshots so I can revert back to a
known good point, with out the need for rebuilding a machine.

I have 3 drives, drive 1 is my real "OS", drive 2 and 3 is where I store the
VM's.