Hello! I'm mostly a programmer by profession. When it comes to servers, I'm rather quite new. I've been reading a lot of the guides on this subreddit and have been looking at possible "first server" purchases. Mainly I'm just experimenting at the moment. I want to get my hands dirty with some virtualization... bring up some VMs for development testing, maybe a game server or two from time to time.

I read the hardware guides, which speaks a lot about Dells and HPs. I've also been seeing in various posts some good words about Supermicros and I like what I'm hearing about how they are (less) proprietary than the others (I'm a Linux user by nature. Not a fan of lock-ins if I can help it). As I've been looking through various listings, I can across this (https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-1U-Server-X8DTU-F-2x-Xeon-X5650-2-66ghz-Hex-Core-32gb-DVD-4x-Trays/232648620239?hash=item362af038cf:g:CM4AAOSwzi9Z5MdX) and I'm wondering if that's a good deal? Being new to servers in general, I'm still trying to get my barrings with the specs. I'm aware it has no HDDs, but, that could be remedied, lol.

I'd like to hear your thoughts, one way or the other, and thank you :)