The Dell T110 was one of those hot deals 2 months ago (paid around $300). While they do advertise 2 NIC ports, it only came with 1 (still dealing with Dell support, but they are not much help). Besides that, I am very happy with the system, and I am sure it will pay for itself pretty quick once I shut down the old systems.
There is software out there which can take real time backups of virtual machines, but none of it is free. VMWare is actually telling companies to not support the free ESXi version anyways. I am using Acronis in the actual VM environment, and schedule a weekly backup (full snapshot) directly dumped onto my NAS.
I also use SyncBackPro to backup critical data on a daily basis to that same NAS. I feel this covers almost all angles, but I might also move my critical VM image to my NAS using iSCSI (so the entire guest is on a RAID5 disk set), I just need to do some more testing (looking promising so far tho).
There is software out there which can take real time backups of virtual machines, but none of it is free. VMWare is actually telling companies to not support the free ESXi version anyways. I am using Acronis in the actual VM environment, and schedule a weekly backup (full snapshot) directly dumped onto my NAS.
I also use SyncBackPro to backup critical data on a daily basis to that same NAS. I feel this covers almost all angles, but I might also move my critical VM image to my NAS using iSCSI (so the entire guest is on a RAID5 disk set), I just need to do some more testing (looking promising so far tho).