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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."
I run about 3-4 different VM's on a dual core with 4 gigs of ram on any given day.
My dual core 2006 Gateway laptop with 2G ram did this - almost every version of Windows running at once on top of Ubuntu 8.04 with eye candy. It's not a 64-bit machine, either, so I've known for a while that fairly low-end computers can run virtualization software fairly well.
you used a video camera to record a computer screen? How quaint.
:x
you used a video camera to record a computer screen? How quaint.
Not only does the Eye of GNOME desktop recorder software misbehave with my low-end video hardware, but those CPU cycles alone would have been greater than that of the virtual machines. Don't automatically assume judgments without knowing all of the details.
What? Others don't do clustering at home? I must be the only one.
The game.