I'm not going to make an assertion as to whether it is better to hold a machine fast to its role in an environment, or be flexible with what your hardware does as needs and preferences change, but one of the things that I've been happy with is TECT's ability and my own willingness to be flexible in terms of configuration and overall architecture. To answer your question in advance: Yes, this is another "I reconfigured a computer!" post.
When I bought TECT, the ultimate goal was to use it as a giant sandbox, and when I purchased it, I had absolutely no inclination toward a lot of the things that I pay a whole lot of attention to these days. In some ways that's great because it means that TECT really has helped me learn a lot about computing – I've set up two virtualization infrastructures with it, and it has made me think about a lot of things I would certainly otherwise never have done so, such as what a user or company does when they have a lot of data that needs to be preserved, or different aspects of computing performance. (Despite being two years old now, with a processor that was kind of old when it was new, TECT remains my most powerful single computer.) The machine it replaced, the venerable flatdell was a powerful computer in its own right, but it couldn't quite get away from what it was – a fairly low-end desktop PC for homes. Flatdell was granny's letter-writing computer, and TECT can be the base of a large virtualization environment, a multi-dozen-user terminal server, the web server for a very large web site, or an ERP, database, or application server.
As soon as I gave it a new RAID controller and brought it up to sixteen gigabytes of memory, TECT truly came into its own as a virtualization server, and the ability to create and destroy entire multi-server environments with joined desktops at will is… a very powerful capability, and I can't recommend a machine like TECT enough for somebody with the budget who needs or wants a lab where they almost never have to worry about resources.
After a while, the types of environments I started trying to build were somewhat accurately representing what a good "enterprise" environment might be, but TECT is still just a single machine with a single point of failure, I spent a whole lot more time configuring things than I felt like I needed to at this point, and I was running around cutting ram on VMs in order to fit more operating systems in.
What I ended up doing, because I wanted to get SharePoint, some sort of remote access, Exchange, and a bunch of file shares running as quickly as possible, is moving over to Small Business Server 2011. After a fairly significant amount of trouble migrating my SharePoint site over, a domain transfer, and some trouble with my router, I'm pleased to say that I have the complete functionality of Small Business Server running, meaning that (although I don't know how much I'll migrate to it) I have an e-mail address at stenoweb.net running on Exchange on my own hardware inside my own home, along with this blog and the SharePoint bits surrounding it, and I've also got VPN access in. I haven't yet joined my main laptop to the domain, but I'm likely to do so before too long.
At this point, I'm able to focus on fairly major projects like organizing protecting data, rearranging or purging my fleet of old laptops, and doing some writing with (hopefully) a little bit less worry about the underlying server infrastructure.
To this end, I have to mention that it makes me just a little bit sad that Microsoft killed the Windows Small Business $YEAR Standard product as we had known it. Windows Server 2012 Essentials is not horrible, but Microsoft seems very much to prefer that you do not install Exchange or Sharepoint directly on that machine, although it has the advantage of allowing more ram, having simpler licensing and gaining some of the client computer backup functionality that had previously been relegated to Windows Storage Server. I can see why of course – Microsoft would very much prefer that you pay a certain fee per user to have access to their online SharePoint and Exchange services, especially for the smallest of businesses, and even now that I'm just running a single server operating system, SBS 2011 Standard is technically far beyond what a single home user is really "supposed" to do.
That's not stopping me from really enjoying this set up, and I've even got some backups going of the C:\ disk, to protect my new Exchange, SharePoint, and WSUS data – along with the SBS 2011 installation itself.
This brings me to a small side-note on the way I've configured SBS and my disks on TECT. Like the Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise installation before it, I have SBS booting from a 2TB volume (approximately 1800GB, formatted) and I have "file data" on a volume that's just about 9600GB, formatted. Right now, I have so little data on the C:\ volume that for now I am protecting it by backing it up onto a pair of rotating 750GB "portable" USB hard disks. It's impressive how easy it is to back up a volume that has less than a hundred gigabytes of data, and even if that volume grows to 200 or 300 gigs, the disks I'm using now will suffice for rotating backups.
This new configuration has made me think a lot about how I preserve the data that lives on TECT. As previously mentioned, C:\ has just shy of a hundred gigabytes of data, and D:\ has just shy of two terabytes of data.
Warning: backup talk ahead.
In an ideal situation, I'd be able to restore the entire machine to any given point of time, but I think that given costs and the environment TECT lives in, it may be worth my time to look into daily backups of the C:\ disk which rotate, and weekly backups of the D:\ disk which rotate. Separating the data that changes by the minute or hour, such as Exchange and Sharepoint from data that changes less frequently, and where losses are more tolerable (such as my video share) allows me to reduce media costs and do backups of the critical dynamic data during the week on a single cartridge, and the slightly less important and slightly more static data over the weekend.
For a while, I had been set on the most expensive possible backup methodology, disk to disk to tape using an expensive secondary controller, a gargantuan array of huge disks, and if possible, a tape autoloader using LTO5 or 6 cartridges. However, RDX is fast enough that if I only need to do a full backup of the big dataset (which is honestly smaller than I had thought, and likely to get smaller as I go through and remove duplicate copies of things during the organization process), I can just hang out at home while it happens. Using today's 1.5TB RDX cartridges and a generous compression setting, it's possible that D:\ could fit on a single cartridge anyway.
I'll be monitoring the data situation, but at this point I'm pretty pleased with my work on TECT. The reorganization has made it easier to manage and for the time being is allowing me to think of the machine in terms of data and tasks, rather than in terms of what virtual machine is doing what task, or what task haven't I been able to deploy yet, due to a shortage of resources.
Will TECT stay this way forever? Who knows. I like all of the services it's now providing and desktops and laptops have gotten to the point (again) where I can easily virtualize small networks at my desk, so there's no pressing need to begin virtualizing on TECT again, at least not until it gets some more ram.