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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."
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.)
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.