Bobby_Tables

I would at least upgrade the RAM to 4GB.

Completely agree. Performance wise, 50 would be better than 6, but it's bad in terms of fault tolerance (only takes one of the two RAID-5's to fail). RAID 10 would be preferable to both. What is your hardware? Could you look at upgrading the drives or adding more drives?

Have you considered Meraki?

Hyper-V, unless you have a strong preference for something else and have the money to buy support/feature licenses. I think 16GB would be OK. Perhaps have the base installation run Hyper-V and nothing else. Then have a VM for each of the three roles, each with 4GB. Can't really comment on this without knowing more about it. Why do you have two separate networks? Would it be easier to combine them?

You really wouldn't notice the difference, but yes, the one on the left has the slightly updated model of the same CPU. You mentioned in the OP that this was going to be a DC and host Sophos and WSUS? I would definitely consider more than 8GB of RAM, and virtualise these three different roles.

What you need is the DL320e v2 http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=5379527 It's only 38.3cm deep.

Do the other chassis fans spin? Does the PC boot up regardless? Is this the CPU fan or just an extra chassis fan? When you say "lights", do you mean there are LEDs built into the fan, or are you talking about the main power/activity lights for the whole PC? How have you connected the fan? Motherboard header or directly to the power supply? Do you have another fan you could connect to the same plug, to see whether the problem is with that particular fan?

Perhaps a GoPro with an SD card large enough to record for the length of a lesson at your chosen resolution/frame rate?

What do you mean by "good RAID support"? Is this for a server? More context needed.

Actually, RAID10 can suffer multiple drive failures - as long as not all of the failed drives come from the same mirror set. If you have a four drive RAID10, for example, one drive from each mirrored pair can fail without the array going offline; you are effectively left with a RAID 0 until you can replace the problem drives and rebuild the mirrors.

Minimum of four drives for RAID6. I disagree with you on your other points, but hey-ho!

Yes, RAID 6 offers you slightly greater protection because it doesn't matter which two drives in the array fail, whereas with RAID10 the two failed drives would have to be from different mirrors. But in my view, that's not a reason to completely discount RAID10. It's a slight trade off of some redundancy for potentially better performance. Depending on the scenario that might be what is needed. I would suggest that with RAID10 the array repair time would be much quicker than RAID5/6, and the hot spare means the repair would start immediately. You will always hear horror stories but think about it objectively - the chances of a double failure scenario are really quite low.

So this is both local storage for servers and shared storage for users. How much space do you think you'll need in total for local server storage and all your shares? What about future growth? We don't know about the size of your environment - perhaps you could elaborate? I would go for RAID 10 with a hot spare, or two RAID 1 sets, one for each purpose. IMO storage performance makes a big difference and RAID 5 or 6 wouldn't offer good enough IOPS. To be honest I can't think of any situation where I would choose RAID 5. RAID 6 would be alright in a large sequential storage scenario like a media server or backup storage, but personally I'd rather have more random IOPS performance for a scenario like yours where it's live local storage for all sorts of purposes simultaneously.

I'm a technician and my workstation has 16GB. Everyone in the team got an upgrade to 8GB from the standard 4GB in this machine, and I added another 8 myself. I think it makes a difference with the number of applications I have running at once.

Why not just order and install a couple of extra DIMMs yourself?