StarWind Software

This is an open ended/subjective question.
I'm in the process of buying some hardware & trying to decide how "high end" the mb should be.
I'm leaning Asus Z8PE-D12 or 18 or a SuperMicro mb

For those that have "rolled" their own servers or used a Dell/HP/your fav brand etc.

What type of hardware is needed? (o/s is 2008 R2)
- Single or Dual Quad core cpu?
- Memory? 4, 6, 8gb or more?
- HDD: SSD boot disk, SAS or SATA storage drives?

femi

Quad is better (even with lower frequency).
4 is better, if you will use really lot of cache - use 6 or more.
Type of HDD depends on your tasks.

I would say that SSD is overkill for a server boot disk. You shouldn't be rebooting it very often, and the boot disk of a Starwind server (assuming targets are on other disks) doesn't get worked very hard, so SSD doesn't give you much advantage.

You could spend the money saved on more RAM, faster CPU etc. Or, use the SSD for data, where it WILL make a big performance difference.

Exactly... With HA server boot time is not an issue as it runs in the background in any case - HA cluster is fully powered and serving requests with the other nodes. Unless we'd add L2 caching with SSD or de-duplication thing going for more RAM and faster CPU is a better idea.