Anyone using XenServer at home and could give me some ideas?

[MultiForce]

Installed XenServer 6.2 @ work because I needed to get a SonicWall syslog server up (Analyzer). So far it seems to work great but it's not really generating much load so I can't say anything about performance. The VMs are on local storage.

Thinking of using it at home too because I want to be able to test out some Linux stuff and as a noob it's pretty nice to be able to use snapshots and/or export.

Got one i3 3ghz thingy with 8 GB RAM that I can use for FreeNAS and then set up NFS shares for the VMs. Thinking of using two RAID 1 sets, one for a VM who will be used for downloading from usenet and one to use for fun (1-2 VMs I guess). I don't really think that the "download" VM should be sharing storage with the others because of the load.
I guess I need two NICs and load balancing on the FreeNAS though.

Have one FreeNAS box already for storage, so I don't need a lot of space for the VMs.

I do need to buy some HW to run XenServer on but it seems to support most stuff out there so I guess that won't empty the wallet anyway.

Backup isn't really needed, it's more than enough to just export a VM now and then and dump it onto my other FreeNAS box.

Any thoughts or ideas?

[MultiForce]

Ended up buying an AMD FX-8350 8 core thingy, GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ and 16 GB RAM (yeah I'll get more later).

Installed XenServer, added some disks and another NIC.
Dedicated 2 HDDs, one NIC, 4 CPU cores and 8 GB RAM for the download VM. A bit overkill but at least it's fast enough.

Installed two more ubuntu VMs just to let them work the other cores too and the rest of the RAM and it's still fast as hell.

I've not tried to share one disk between two VMs yet but I guess it'll be pretty slow if both are working a lot. Need to test it though.

Snapshots for Linux noobs like me is just heaven :)