In January, I received some decommissioned hardware from my employer, and I have been making incremental changes since then. To best document the improvements, it's important to frame the work by defining the starting configuration.

Virtualization:

PowerEdge SC440

Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz

8GB DDR2 ECC RAM

XenServer 7

Storage:

Core 2 Duo E4400 2GHz

4GB DDR2 RAM

6x 2TB 7200 RPM SATA

FreeNAS 9.2

Networking:

TP-Link Archer C9

They are former desktops that got a second life as servers.