Description of the hardware components

 The hardware used for this virtualisation testbed is the following:

• Casing
  ref: NZXT-H2 MIDI TOWER BLACK
  Price: < 80 €
  Despite the low price I will not use this housing again,the aus mother board has several 4-pin fan connectors where two pins are used to drive the fans and the two other pins are used to measure the rotation speed of the fan. Since the casing's fans have only two pin connectors, the rotational speed is not measured resulting in fan defect errors.
   
• Power supply
  ref: CORSAIR-CX500 V2 500W BUILDER SERIES PSU
  Price < 50 €
  No remarks. Silent and cool.
   
• CPU cooler
  SCYTHE-MUGEN III REV. B - Impressive cpu cooler
  Price < 40 €
  Impressive and huge cpu cooler, but installing this thing on the cpu is very a awkward thing. High risk of killing the cpu, mother board or both. But the cooler and fan are off course required since the cpu can be overclocked from 3.4 to 5.7 Ghz. This CPU is still a first generation I7, newer versions are manufactured in 22 nm instead of 32 nm and only use around 70 W.
   
• RAM memory
  Ref.: CORSAIR-CML16GX2 - 16 GB high speed RAM
  Price: < 85 €
  Next time I will buy 32 GB instead of 16GB!
   
• Mother board
  Ref.: ASUS-P8Z77- PRO DD3 SOCKET 1155 Intel Z77 chipset mother board
  Price: < 170 €
   
• CPU
  Ref.: INTEL Core I7 2600 K 32nm 4 Cores 8 threads 3.4 - 5.7 GHz CPU
  Price <  250 €
  I was set for the 2700 model, but that one was no longer available. New models run even faster and consume less power.
   
• Hard disk
  Ref.: WESTERN DIGITAK WD1002FAEX 1TB 64MB SATA600 7200 rpm HARD DISK
  Price: < 100 €