Hi, I have come to realize that I really need a home lab to learn vmware and other technologies more. At work, I work, so I have no time to "play". I have 2 machines that I install esxi on, they are i5's with 12GB ram. I want shared storage to really grasp technologies. I have narrowed down my choices to 2 NAS device. Synology seems to make great products, so I'm looking at a DS712+ or a DS411+II. One is 2 bay and the other is 4 bay respectively. The 2 bay, I would run RAID 1 with (2) 2TB Seagate drives, and the 4 bay, I would run raid 5, probably with 1TB drives, or maybe 4 500GB drives.
What I dont grasp is, is the 2 bay enough? In my environment, I would like to run a DC, vcenter, VMware View (server components and desktops), MS Products, such as Sharepoint and SQL. Storage space wise, I think 2TB would be enough, but I do not know how performance would be? The last thing I need to to use my allocated study time slot, away from the family, and deal with really slow performing VMs.
I'm new to this, so I don't understand if my concerns are valid. Help? 
- MN