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."

Comments

Don't bother with 'server' hardware

[Minwee]

The difference between 'server class' hardware and you beige box PC is that the more expensive 'server' is a lot more reliable and has extra remote access and hardware monitoring features. That's about it. If all you want is to run virtual machines in a test environment, just get a desktop with a hefty CPU and a whole whack of RAM and you're set. A good 'gaming' machine without the video card would be fine. You don't need to spend extra for a 'server'.