After adding extra disks to the home "data centre" and then getting a new backup device (Dell RD1000), today I took a punt on upgrading the RAM. When I originally bought my Dell PE SC1430 it was rated at a maximum of 8GB RAM. The latest models offer a maximum of 16GB of RAM, and after finding nothing on the interwebs that might indicate that my particular model couldn't cope with more than 8GB, I tentatively splashed out on an extra 2x4GB FBDIMMS. It seems all PE SC1430s (with the latest BIOS) support more than 8GB of RAM (well, at least 12GB, and I suppose 16GB if you populate 4x4GB).

 12GB of RAM! Yay

Currently my production VMs consume around 7GB of RAM (Exchange and Ops Manager 2007 around 2GB each, plus Windows Home Server takes another 1GB), so testing new OSes (like Windows Server 2008 R2) is difficult. With the extra unallocated RAM, it'll be easier to test beta server OSes :-)