I've been slowly acquiring pieces of a budget home lab environment over the last few months. Rather then invest in one large system I wanted a little more flexibility to explore clusters and other options. My primary focus will be setting up the MS 'Private Cloud' configuration, in part for a home test environment and so I can play with different things and maybe get some updated certifications. I also wanted to experiment with monitoring VMware through SCVMM and SCOM 2012sp1 to see how viable a solution that was. Since I have changed roles at work that last is a little less pressing but still something I want to look at to satisfy my curiosity.
Hardware list: