server rack installed

I received the rack this weekend and put it to use immediately

Before the rack, there was an ad-hoc collection of boxes: 

The bottom box is the server and the small black box is the storage tower. 

Afterwards, the situation is much cleaner:

In any case, it is a bit cleaner now. As soon as the server and storage rack are replaced, they will also become rackmount components. For now, I am leaving the situation as is.

The next step is the UPS which will hopefully arrive in the coming week. The UPS will be installed at the bottom of the rack. 

As for replacement of the storage array and server I am still a bit uncertain. At the moment, both are working fine and there is no reason to replace them. The server is a bit problematic however as I found out that the motherboard BIOS doesn't support intel VT even though the processor and motherboard chipset support it. Also, the server is currently at its limit w.r.t. memory (2GB) and for a virtualized solution, more memory would definitely be nice.

When it comes to virtualization I would be running 4 virtual appliances as I see now: (1) mythtv box, (2) server, (3) virtualized windows, (4) experimentation linux server. With the current hardware limitations and the current lack of intel VT support, this would be difficult. In particular, not enough computing resources (especially memory) and a tight coupling of host and guest domains and the inability to run a virtualized windows. For the latter, I am currently running vmware but that is also becoming more and more bloatware with lots of processes and complex configuration so I want to get rid of that in time.

Of course, I could also get a new server (quad core intel Xeon low power Nehalem based) and turn the current server into a multimedia PC by making it more silent and adding a remote control for instance. Also, getting rid of the current KiSS hard disk recorder would be nice as it is only used for playing recordings made by mythtv.