So I  am thinking of getting this for my home lab set up. What y'all thoughts on this?
http://cgi.ebay.com/1U-SERVER-2x-DUAL-CORE-OPTERON-AMD-275-2-2GHZ-8GB-150GB_W0QQitemZ390032421975QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCOMP_EN_Servers?hash=item390032421975&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1234|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1308|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

Dark_Knight,

on the whole looks like a good bit of kit for the price.

Do a bit of your own research before you take the plunge though as I wouldn't take all of the 'retail' prices at face value. For example, $480 retail for 8GB of RAM seems a little steep. I've just purchased 4GB of server RAM to upgrade my own lab server and it cost me the equivalent of $90, including delivery.

Looks good like a good deal, but (unsurprisingly) probably not quite as good as the seller is claiming

Dark_knight,

currently I'm just running with the standard single 250GB SATA that came with the machine. I didn't have to many problems getting ESXi installed, although you need more memory to install it than the 1GB RAM that came with the server. Seems to be a fairly well known issue, cheap RAM upgrade ~£40 for another 4GB did the job.

Only issue I've had since is getting the guests to see the drives. For Windows OSes, but VMWare have released a floppy image with the required drivers here. Once I found this it's been plain-sailing.

Did you have any specific issues in mind that you were expecting me to hit? (I might have had to find a work around and them promptly forgot...)

A couple nix along with some windoze. I wanna have about 4-5 images in total.

THat's a sweet deal then.  If you could find another with a little more RAM, you would be set because you'll want to allocate more than 1GB per image for functionality.

Not only that, but this could also be a platform for you to either get your RHCE or MCSE if you want which is why I suggested more RAM.  Either way, it's a sweet deal.

Just went out and bought a new server with 16GB of RAM (< to 64GB!) and with 2 Quad-core processors.  It cost around $1500 but I have different network images that works for customer demos or even training.  Thought about also using it to do a deeper dive into Redhat (very familiar already) and maybe even get my RHCE.  Or I can just stick with security images like NAC, ACS, MARS, and CSA.  Been also interested in voice too and should look into Cisco Call Mgr, Unity, Presence, and other ones for solid VOIP familiarity, and assessments.

Damn, not sure where I'm gonna find the time for all this!  Haha.  Unless I get laid off due to all these cutbacks everyone.  

Now that sounds familiar I've spent the best part of a week trying to find time get a vulnerable application installed, never mind actually developing the exploit.....

While I'm currently using my lab to practice the offensive side trying to complete OffSec101, eventually I'm wanting to go down the route of malware analysis. Similar scenarios to the talk Tom Liston gave at ChicagoCon 2007