In this episode, the Size Matters crew discuss servers from the SMB perspective.

We started off with a discussion of server vendors popular in the SMB space, agreeing that Dell and HP take the lion's share of that market. We then dove into a sample configuration of a Dell server Mike felt was good as an all-purpose Windows server:

PowerEdge T320
1 CPU
16GB RAM
4 1TB SATA HD's in RAID5, with Hot Spare
Windows Server 2012R2 Standard
24x7 Support, Next Business Day

$3,110 before shipping

We had an interesting discussion about how this server could handle, both spec-wise and license-wise, an additional VM or two if necessary.

We then bumped that config up to 64GB of RAM, removed Server 2012R2 in favor of either free Hyper-V or ESXi, added Intel NICs, an internal SD module for the hypervisor, and left everything else the same, coming to a price (without an OS) of $3,301.

 
Let us know via Twitter what you think of the configs and whether or not you agree with the points we made.