I find myself seriously lacking hardware, and soon, to be stuck supporting several new systems of various OS.

How do you support it? Software! I’m in the process of creating several various production systems through the joy of virtualization: Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. This is nothing new – it’s been done for years. However, in a pinch, when it’s stable, it’s good enough for testing and development BEFORE deployment. (For instance, I recently discovered that the grsec Linux patches against 2.6.x cause quite an issue with some unsigned 2.6 modules.)