Originally Posted by
rthonpm
Don't get anything older than a x20 series PowerEdge, but you may want to look at a tower server: depending on where you're putting this server, rack boxes have a tendency to be very loud when all of the fans get going. Make sure you've got a RAID card in it, and depending on your drives go RAID 10 for spinning drives or RAID 5 for SSD: RAID 5 and spinning disks area no-go. For spinning disks, get as large as you can afford with a minimum of 4 to support RAID 10 (you'll need Dell branded drives if you're using a Dell branded RAID card).
Use a Type 1 Hypervisor like ESXI or Hyper-V Server as opposed to installing an operating system and then using VMWare player or VirtualBox or some other type 2 hypervisor, otherwise you've wasted money investing in a server. I'm personally a Hyper-V guy, but either ESXI or Hyper-V will work well as a platform.
There are more reliable sites than eBay as well, though you will definitely end up paying more, you at least get a warranty and support. XByte is a good source for servers, but you'll pay a lot more than eBay.
If you're doing AD, your domain controller will also act as your DNS server, but you can install DNS as a separate service on its own server. My personal lab consists of a domain controller, Windows SMB (file) server, IIS (web) server, all of them are Server Core installs, a Linux (CentOS 7) Apache server (bound to Active Directory), and a couple of Linux and Windows workstations, all bound to Active Directory. I tend to wipe the machines and start over quite frequently, as I mainly use it as a demo for customer setups. For Windows systems, you can download evaluation copies of all Windows Server versions which are good for 180 days, and re-loadable for an additional 180 days up to three additional times.
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