Development Servers

I recently built a home development environment, basically an upgrade from what I had. 

The new setup includes 3 physical machines:

1. Domain Controller / Hyper-V server
• Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 Ghz
• Asus P6T – had to install newest Bios update to get the RAM to post
• Currently 18GB DDR3 1333Mhz Ram (Going to be 24 GB soon enough)
• OCZ 12 GB Kit – OCZ3G1333LV12GK
• Corsair 6GB kit
• RAID 5 – 500 GB WD 7200 rpm drives
• 2 x 1.5 TB Seagate Data drives
• Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
• Domain Controller
• Hyper V Role
• Exchange 2010
• SharePoint 2007 Development Box
• SharePoint 2010 Development Box
• CRM
2. SQL Server
• Intel Q6600 @ 2.8Ghz
• Abit Ip35 Pro
• 8 GB Corsair DDR2 800Mhz RAM
• RAID 5 – 500 GB WD 7200 rpm drives
• Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
• SQL Server 2008 R2
• Instance for SP2007
• Instance for SP2010
• Instance for CRM
• SSRS/SSIS enabled for each
3. Workstation
• AMD FX64 @ 2.6 GHz
• Asus MB
• 8 GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz RAM
• Single 250 GB Seagate 7200 rpm HD
• Windows 7 x64

The nice thing about the setup? Nothing really has to run on my local machine.  I occasionally run Visual Studio to look at files, or sync my phone with it, etc.  It is a powerful enough dumb terminal for me though.  I browse web pages on it, and really just remote desktop into the dev server I am going to work on.  Another great thing is that I have not really invested all that much into it.  Each time I feel the itch to build a new system (about every year to two) I get a solid motherboard, decent processor, fill half the banks of RAM(depending on price I might fill in all the banks), cheap video card, 1 to 2  hard drives (a 500 GB drive at the time of this article is ~50-60 bucks), a cheap OEM CD/DVD drive, Case (if I need one) and beast of a power supply (usually spend about $100 on a PSU even if it is only 500-600W).  All in all, I am usually only out 500-750 dollars and will reuse some lesser important components from the machine being trashed, or clear it and donate it to a local school/church.  Hard drives are cheap enough these days, I would highly recommend that you replace primary drives every year.  $50 bucks goes a long way to save your photos/documents/etc. 

Rundown of costs to build a new machine from scratch
100-150 Motherboard
100-200 Proc
100-200 Memory
100 – Power Supply
50-100 Hard drive(s)
30-50 Video Card
50 – Case
25 – CD/DVD

Range $555 - $875, again if you save a case, CD/DVD, video card, etc.  you get a decently new machine for a pretty good price.