Looking for small single board webservers or plugs to build out a 50 server farm

Question

At work we are building a test lab of our new web environment. I need to put up ~ 50 servers in 10 different vlans. I was looking at small single boards (Ardus, with a Ethernet shield) or plug style servers (Sheva plugs) The servers don't need to serve up anyting fancy, just basic "Hello Sailor" pages. I'd like to be able to manage content off of SD or miniSD drives.

I want the individual servers vs a wack load of VM's, can you make a recommendation on what hardware to recommend.

Answer 1

Why extreme physicallisation over virtualisation? You could likely get similar price/ performance off a series of desktops running virtual machines

If you wanted to go VERY simple, static webpages, you might want to consider arudinos with ethernet shields or other embedded systems over shevas for pure cost. Arudinos are out of scope here