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John Troyer (@jtroyer) asked a question on Twitter last night about a CloudCred prize of $1000-2000:

That got me thinking – was it possible to create an entire 2 host lab with storage on a $2000 budget? My first step was to convert it into a proper currency:

I figured that I’d stick to the Intel NUC route that I’ve gone down for my lab at home – I love the NUC for its tiny form factor, silent operation and really low power consumption. There are down sides – it can only take 16GB RAM, only one mSATA disk and only has one gigabit NIC. I don’t think any of those are too big a deal for a personal lab though – certainly I’ve not had any problems building and testing VMware products on my single NUC. I’d drop in an 8GB stick of RAM and an Intel 60GB mSATA SSD per NUC – you could always go 16GB later by adding another 8GB stick in the 2nd slot. I picked the Intel mSATA disk for it’s controller and throughput figures – there are larger and cheaper ones but not with the same write performance. Since the use of SSD is massively in focus with vFlash, PernixData FVP and several other technologies, you wouldn’t want to miss out. I’ve also added an 8GB USB3 flash drive per NUC to boot ESXi from.