Background: In my home LAN I have pfsense, freenas, asterisk and a HTPC all on their own box. The first 3 are on really old junk yard PCs and the HTPC is a pretty much brand new i3 machine with a flash graphics card and all that jazz.
Question: I can't help but think I can run my entire setup a hell of lot more efficiently if everything was centralised on a main server. I don't know the first thing about virtualising stuff so thought I would ask here.
I have had a quick look around and found the MSI P67A-GD65. It has heaps of SATA ports, enough PCI slots and best of all it's cheap!! With that I was thinking a ~3GHz Core i5, fill up the RAM with 4gb sticks and then chuck in all my PCI cards.
This is where I started wondering... is an i5 going to have enough grunt to run 3 lightweight OS's plus XBMC to be the HTPC? Would it be better to just run pfsense, freenas and asterisk on the central server and keep the HTPC as it is? And if I just run the 3 lightweights could I get away with a lighter (cheaper) processor?
The other I guess I should ask is if I put the graphics card in can I make it only available to the XBMC part of the machine?.... I think I know that you probably can but again, total noob here.
Oh and I was going to use vSphere Hypervisor for virtualising because it's free lol.