Bought one of these with a basic M2 SATA card + 32 GB of ram to run various VMs on a linux hypervisor (RHEL7) -- a heavy cpu instance (24/7 transcoding), 2 heavy RAM instances, and a **very** heavy i/o (both r and w) instance.  All are backed by a nfs mount that housed the qcow images.  The instances themselves can be pretty chatty and the various instances have heavy network traffic at times -- basically, I beat this device up a lot.  This NUC handles it all beautifully. The hardware runs surprisingly cool in my cramped closet to boot.  While its not right next to me, I rarely hear the fan from about 6 feet away.  It's leaps and bounds above what I tried to do myself with a mini-ITX board and a custom case not that long ago.  I was impressed enough that I just bought another one to run as my primary desktop.What more could I ask?  A second onboard NIC card.  With that this would be an ideal device.