I’ve got no doubt I’ll take some heat for going this route, but my solution to the build it or buy it dilemma was in fact to buy a new box. I decided to go for a machine from their business lineup, the Vostro 430 MT. This machine comes with a bunch of cores and an ample amount of RAM will allow this box to become the base for my home computing activities.

This machine’s primary duty will be to take over the day-to-day computing tasks from my Macbook freeing it up for mobile-only duties so that I’m not carrying around the primary copies of most of my data every time I leave the house.  In addition, I’ll be virtualizing the two desktop machines I have in the basement today, one of which has succumbed to old age in the past couple of months.  The VMs will provide some added flexibility as far as Operating Systems and some single-duty machines.

For now I’m evaluating a couple of virtualization options to use on the new box when it arrives, and I’m re-working the layout of the home network, splitting out VLANs for the servers to help isolate them a bit from the rest of the network. The main goal of some of this is to play around and learn the technologies, of course.

Some of the VM applications I’m considering include test machines for development, SSH tunnel/proxy for remote access, web server, Mozilla Weave server, secure machine for my office VPN and whatever else my dreams, or nightmares (or conversations with Knightwise) inspire.

The machine should arrive in the next week, unboxing and other additional posts will follow.