ESXi Server Realized

So, my tentative plans to build an ESXi server have become more concrete. My wife's Christmas present to me consists of letting me budget to build an ESXi (most likely) host. So far, I have gotten the hardware lined up and the total cost is looking to be around $2,500. 

Below are the specifications I have lined up.

•  ASUS RS500A-E6/PS4 1U Rackmount Barebone Server 
• Dual G34 Socket (Opteron 6300/6200/6100)
• 256GB RDIMM 1600/1333/1066/800 DDR3
• Dual Intel 82574L 10/100/1000 NIC
• 1x MGMT LAN
• 4x 3.5 Hotswap Bays

• 2x AMD Opteron 6320 Abu Dhabi 2.8GHZ 8-Core
• Wintec 32GB (4x8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 Registered
• 2x Kingston 120GB SSDNow (OS)
• 2x Western Digital 1TB WD AV-GP (VM/Datastore)
• 1x Intel EXPI9301CT 10/100/1000 NIC

Those are just the essentials. I hope to have everything assembled before or during the week of Christmas. You might ask why an aspiring CCNP wants to experiment with virtualization. Besides virtualization being another of my interests, it has also become a fact of life in most datacenters as well as becoming increasingly prevalent in networking with the advent of virtualized network elements. If nothing else, it adds more variety to my growing lab.