Virtual Lab Set up need your input

I have two older hp machines with p4 2.4 ghz both have 4 ram slots I have 2x1gb, 4x512 2x256 chips. I have 2x80gb and 2x160gb hard drives. I used to have vmware server set up and moved one to vmware esxi. I want to move both machines over to esxi. I also want to mess around with free nas and emulate iscsi to play with extents and targets for a lun/san. My question is should I have one machine juiced up with 3gb memory with 80gb and 160gb hdd with esxi and the second machine 1.5gb ram with 80gb and 160gb and just have freenas installed to act as a san or install esxi on that and virtualizes freenas so I can still use it to host some guests? Or should I have both machines only using 2.25 gb ram and virtualizes free nas on one of them? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

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dynamik

You might want to check out open filer: Connect VMware ESX Server to a Free iSCSI SAN

I'd balance the memory and use another physical machine for your iSCSI storage, but you could always virtualize it if you were tight on hardware. You'll just take a performance hit, but that shouldn't be detrimental for what you're doing.