Blackrain

Yeah SSD is the only way to go for storage of the VMs if you're not going with a RAID array. I have MicroCenter near the house so I can get the 8350 for 179 and 40 bucks off the same motherboard you have in your setup. I plan to overclock hopefully to 5ghz with the h100 cosair liquid cooling kit. This box in the end will be a lab / NAS as I plan to virtualize my unRAID server in this box. Thanks for the heads up!

The only frustration with my build is storage. I am working with Server 2012 vms. One is a DC, one is an Exchange 2013 server, and one will be Lync 2013. Trying to run all three at once and work inside of them has been frustrating. The Exchange 2013 install takes a long time anyways, but it was especially painful on my set up. I'm considering getting a small SSD for staging or a larger one to run the OS disks and put the storage for Lync and Exchange on my 1TB drive. Unless I can find a reasonably priced ESXi 5.1 compatible RAID card, I'm not inclined to jump on a RAID setup at this point.

I would definitely plan on a SSD for your build.

Otherwise, I'm very happy with my build. The 32GB of RAM has been a nice upgrade. I guess I could have spent an extra $20 and gone with the 8350 over the 8320, but I didn't see the need in increased clock speeds for my virtualization purposes, and I was on a tight budget. In the end my rig was ~$800.

Hope this helps.