I've worked in a corporate IT department for the last fifteen years and I know what I like to have available in terms of resources. For my home network, some running as virtual machines under VMWare, I've set up the following machines:

• a network tap device based on a Soekris 5501
• a MySQL 5.0 dedicated machine
• an inwardly-facing proxy running Apache 2.0 with mod_rewrite rules
• a CMS machine running Plone 3
  
• a logging machine running Splunk
• an email server running the AllardSoft Mailserver
  
• a CRM machine running SugarCRM

As much for my practice and reference as for your interest, I'll be making build documents showing how I built each machine and explaining my choices where needed. The OS of choice is Ubuntu server except for the network tap which is running FreeBSD 6.1. Check back occasionally to see what is new!