Windows storage server 2008 r2

[jerwal]

Good afternoon all,

I'm currently building a new nas box,

AMD Athlon X2 250 3.0Ghz CPU - ASRock N68 VS3 Motherboard - 2GB DDR3 1333Mhz Bundle £89 from amazon
EXDISPLAY LSI SAS3442E-R Storage controller (RAID)- Serial ATA-300 / SAS 300 MBps £99 from ebuyer
And I had a modular power supply 650w laying around from maplins I think it was £30.
8x 1TB HDD'S WD green I had for a little while.
4GB CF card

I was thinking of installing nas4free on the box, but then a colleague said as you have a technet sub why not use windows storage server?! The only thing is I'm not quite sure the steps for installing it!

I was just hoping to use the nas as a lun for a few vm's for testing, I guess my questions are:

Does anyone know how to install it?
What spec system it requires?
Is it stand alone (embedded) or do I have to install server 2008 r2 with windows storage server patch on top?
Is it any good for vm's? Connecting to VMware esx 4.0 or 4.1 I can't really remember the number sorry!

Thanks in advance for any help given it's greatly appreciated.

Please excuse any spelling or gramma mistakes I'm not the greatest at writing!

 

[jerwal]

just in case anyone wanted to know:

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials server software is a 64-bit only operating systems.
You can install the server software either manually or unattended
System Requirements:
2.0 GHz x64 processor.
2 GB RAM
At least one160 GB hard drive.
NTFS is the only supported file system.
Supported Networking Configuration:
Your server computer must be connected via a network cable to a router.
The router should be a UPnP-certified device, but it is not required.
The router should be in the 192.168.x.x subnet, but it is not required.

It is a standalone installation.

Work wonderfully with VMware EXSI 4.1 as a LUN when NFS is enable and permission set.