Reply to post: I want to play with VMs

I want to play with VMs

A few years ago, a local company moved and sold some of its IT equipment. I purchased their rack cabinet, all 1.9 meters of U's.

First thing I built was a storage box - got a rackmountable computer case and stuffed it with 9x2TB worth of hard-drives. Still running like a charm after 3+ years of almost no downtime.

Now, I want to play with Virtual Machines, Hypervisors and the ilk. So my question is: considering that this is a home project, what should I get i terms of hardware and software? I have a fileserver with enough storage (well... two now - I got bored), so local storage is probably low on the list. But what CPU/motherboard would be best for a home set-up? What about the choice of Hypervisor - bare-metal or running in an existing OS? And if so, which?

Choices, choices, choices. What are your pearls of wisdom?