Suggestions for Home Hyper-V Server

Now that Hyper-V has gone RTM, we are getting ready to do a "bake-off" at work between VMWare ESX 3.5 and Hyper-V for the servers that will end up in our branch offices. It got me thinking about my home network situation and I am thinking I want to virtualize the house.

Currently I have Ububtu 7.10 running on an old Dell 2400 that acts as my SSL VPN gateway, my torrentflux box, my file server, and other general goodness. I have an old homebuilt PC running 1.8 GHz P4 as my Windows Home Server box which I never use after the whole "file loss debacle". My employer is buying us all the Microsoft books to self-stufy on Windows 2008, but they are not going to have any hardware for us until at least March, 2009 to use to learn on. That will be too late. Also, much to my disappointment, we did not choose Ubuntu as our Linux distro. We have chosen SLES 10 SP2, which is fine, just not my first choice.

So I am thinking of building a server on the cheap with a dual-core CPU and plenty of RAM. I have just under 0.5 TB of files on the server today so I am thinking of putting a small, fast drive in for OS and swap and a second large drive for general storage. As money allows, I would get a third drive that is identical to the second drive and mirror them. I am thinking of running 2-3 virtual guests on this hardware (SLES 10 SP2, Windows 2008, experimenting virtual machine that will change often) so that hardware needs to by virtual capable - not a big deal these days. This does not need to be a powerhouse system since it will mainly have 8 occasional users of its file server capabilities and only 1 user (me) for everything else. Also, since I am trying to learn Hyper-V and our employer is letting us buy Microsoft products at their low cost, I want to do it the hard way and use Hyper-V as my hypervisor. I need to learn the SLES as well to get used to the RPM world again.

So, my questions are:
1) Is there any reason a middle of the road Intel Duo setup with some extra RAM and the two/three HD configuration couldn't handle this?
2) Am I thinking correctly to focus on read/write for the small drive? Since the large drives will only be used by the file server functionality, they can be slower.
3) In general, I should focus more on pushing bits quickly than on processing power - more about cache than CPU speed, faster RAM and more of it, good FSB speed, good disk I/O - is this right?