m1santhrope

The VMware image comes preinstalled with vmware tools. Thats.... pretty much it

DD-WRT does support vlans well, i'm using it to seperate the wlan network from the other networks. What you're probably looking for is setting up a virtual AP http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Multiple_WLANs Also, this could be of use too. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/VLAN_Support

Gnome is fine, it's working well on my alienware m14x. Upgrading from BT5r2 broke everything, so it was easier to reinstall.

I agree. Maybe 1-2 2k3 VMs will run, but it'd be pushing it to have a 2k8 box on there, in addition to a pfsense firewall and other servers. Not to mention your storage problem, 40GB isn't going to hold many VM's. I'd recommend thin provisioning everything, but you'll hit 40GB soon enough.

I'm running a dell poweredge 2950 for virtualization (ESXi 5), and an old (Pentium 3? Might be an old Athlon XP) with pfsense. Had no issues with pfsense, easy to set up and has some cool packages to fiddle around with. Having said that, i've had issues using USB wifi adapters (realtech, have not tried the alfa yet) in pfsense - Mostly causing crashes and requiring a hard reboot. I've heard of good things using supported hardware ( http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Supported_Wireless_Cards ), but have never done so myself. I personally have the vendor supplied modem doing it's thing, which is then hooked up over ethernet to my pfsense firewall.