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

Dell XPS Studio

[drsmithy]

Dell currently have the Studio XPS (2.66Ghz Core i7, 3G RAM, 500G HDD) going for US$800 - for a basic home virtualisation server, it's hard to go past, especially if you spend another US$80 or so to bump the RAM up to 9GB. I can't imagine you could build it yourself for a whole lot less (depending on how you value your time, of course).

(Damn, sometimes I wish I lived in the US. Stuff is just so bloody cheap there.)

Used or scrapped server-class machine

[roc97007]

You can run virtual instances on practically anything. I use VMWare Workstation on an older AMD Athlon 3200+ (the machine on which I'm typing this) and get acceptable performance if I only have one instance booted at a time. You're not going to be playing video-intensive games on the instance, but it'll work find

I maintain a few websites (my blog, a gallery, couple other things) on an old server class machine in the garage. Companies often scrap servers after the 3 year warranty expires, or they've finished depreciating (depending on individual business rules) and they're often fast enough to make reasonable virtual servers. Often you can pick them up at a scrap sale or surplus store, or, if your company has an IT department, get permission to snag a machine that's about to be scrapped.

I recently brought up VMWare's free bare-metal hypervisor ESXi and was surprised at how easy it was to set up and create instances. VMWare has a free Physical-to-Virtual converter you might want to experiment with. It works great with Windows, but is kinda hit-and-miss with Linux.

Re:Reccomend a Quad Core CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Look up "relaxed co-scheduling." It's been in there since around 2006. (Another reason why VMware outperforms the others.)

Re:8 core Mac Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

I often run 3 or 4 on my laptop at the same time with no problem.
1 is a web server (linux) for dev testing.
1 is a photo album server (winxp) for sharing my pics with friends and family.
1 is a VM (winxp) I dedicate for downloading stuff off the net (BT, IRC).
1 is a VM for browsing sites and connecting to work. This one erases everything when I shut it down, in case I get any crap-ware from browsing.

The only thing preventing me from running more would be that my laptop only handles 3GB of memory and 4 VMs plus my host applications get close to reaching that limit. And swapping sucks.

Re:8 core Mac Pro

[crazybit]

that's because it was a PowerPC box, try doing that with the new core2 Apple boxes.

Parent++; you basically don't need specia hardware

[arete]

Basically, as long as each virtual node isn't doing any WORK, you don't need any special hardware. And even if they are doing some work, but just not a lot. We have 5 Linux Xen VMs in production on a 1600Mhz Celeron with 768MB of RAM, works fine, no problems.

The CPU is almost irrelevant - you'll need whatever CPU you'd need to do all the things you're doing, plus some overhead, but it's not like it falls apart.

RAM is the only critical thing. You need at least 96 MB for the host and 24MB for each additional live Xen VM, as I recall (That's probably not precisely right) But you'll naturally be swapping a ton if you do that. A more reasonable VM has 128M - 256MB of RAM itself, so you need that for each active VM. But again, that's only for each one running at a time.

Or if you are going to swap a bunch, get better disks :)

In any case, I definitely wouldn't climb the price curve of equipment to do this; don't buy anything on the bleeding edge - look at arstechnica and just max the RAM on a value box - or maybe upgrade the MB to something that takes more RAM.

Used, commodity computer equipment is usually not price effective compared to the cheap end of what's still available new. But pay attention to the price point where it's cheaper to get (and power, while they're on) TWO value boxes than to pump up the one box you've been thinking of higher.