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Reasonable Hardware For Home VM Experimentation?
cayenne8 writes "I want to experiment at home with setting up multiple VMs and installing sofware such as Oracle's RAC. While I'm most interested at this time with trying things with Linux and Xen, I'd also like to experiment with things such as VMWare and other applications (Yes, even maybe a windows 'box' in a VM). My main question is, what to try to get for hardware? While I have some money to spend, I don't want to, or need to, be laying out serious bread on server room class hardware. Are there some used boxes, say on eBay to look for? Are there any good solutions for new consumer level hardware that would be strong enough from someone like Dell? I'd be interested in maybe getting some bare bones boxes from NewEgg or TigerDirect even. What kind of box(es) would I need? Would a quad core type processor in one box be enough? Are there cheap blade servers out there I could get and wire up? Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."
Xeon based, easy access to multiple drive bays, dual gigabit ethernet, etc. Runs linux, Windows, Mac OS X
...something like this?
I ran into this same situation and found the best cost/performance setup was a Beowulf cluster of netbooks.
You get the cumulative power of those Atom processors and have a huge memory pool to run the VMs within.
and if you're not careful, VMWare apparently makes the Enter key inoperable :)
Dual Opteron < $600
>Since EC2 is a manged infrastructure.
I'd definitely stay away from it if it has mange.