Ask Slashdot: Computer Test Lab Set-Up For Home?

An anonymous reader writes "For as long as I've been playing around with computers I've had a home test lab. I found it to be a great learning tool. However, I haven't invested much money into it lately and because of aging hardware I can't get what I want out of it anymore. So a revamp is in order. I've looked into several cloud vendors for a box I can rent to do some virtualization, but it doesn't seem to be cost effective or practical. What are your thoughts on it? What set-up do you have at home for tinkering? Have you looked into hosted solutions for this?"

Comments

Virtualize

[QuantumRiff]

Buy a computer.. Put >8GB of ram in it (i would recommend 2GB per VM, and 2GB for the host). Maybe some nice fast disks..

Load VMWare ESXi, or another OS and virtual machine software of your choice..

The ability to snapshot and restore things will save you so much time testing things, you'll wonder how you used to get things done before. Maybe, setup a second system or laptop for things like wireless testing, drivers, etc.. things you can't simulate in a VM.. but with the virtual networks in most VM's, you can setup some very, very complex networks...

Re:Virtualize

[addikt10]

I agree with Virtualization (really, it is a must for any lab).
If your budget is low, crank up the specs on your desktop machine, and use VMWare Workstation (or some such).

If you budget is a bit higher, get that machine and dedicate it with Xen Server or vSphere (or whatever)

Higher yet? Get a couple of boxes, and an iSCSI solution so that you can support clusters (iSCSI is much cheaper than fibrechannel, and you can do windows clustering as well as your virtualization platform clustering.)

You want brands? I did it with generic computing hardware (24GB core i7 boxes) and a Thecus iSCSI solution (because I didn't want to take the time to build the iSCSI myself). WD RE4 drives. Get funky with quad-port Intel NICS and a linksys switch that supports VLANS.
Make sure to get a Microsoft TechNet subscription if you are working with Microsoft platforms.
Have fun.

Gonna grow it? Start with VMware Workstation. The VMs you create can migrate to dedicated virtualization platforms as you move up in expenditures.

Re:Virtualize

[Billly Gates]

I will also add to buy an AMD dekstop to do this since he mentioned cost effective. For $499 you can get a Llamo with virtualization instructions with 8 gigs of ram. That can run 4 VMs for cheap. Intel chipsets tend to support ICores with virtualization instructions but disable them in the bios on purpose forcing you to pay more. All AMDs have the ability to turn them on by default.

For that price it is a great deal. Also if you hate virtualbox you can download a trial of VMWare workstation and create the VMs and then uninstall the trial and use the free VM Player to run the images you just created too which is nice.

On my system that is only $699, I can run 4 VMs of XP or CentOS with 1.5 gigs per VM as XP and Linux are not resource intensive which is a 6 core system. It is sweet I can compile code, run XP and play World of Warcraft for that price with it all working flawlessly. It is silly as I do this just to test HTML for obsolete browser from some popular company in the Pacific Northwest, which would be laughable in an ideal universie but that is life until business finally ditches it and the 10 year old kernels. UGH

But with cheap hardware and 1 gig of ram costing $15 each it is inexpensive to do and you feel like you own a mainframe.
But VMs all the way

Re:Virtualize

[jtdennis]

ESXi is free for a basic featureset. For a low budget, I'd recommend it over Workstation which isn't free. If you're working on the same box as your VM host, then maybe Virtualbox would work for a free solution.

Re:Virtualize

[jdastrup]

Does it bug anyone else around here when they boast about how they built systems for as cheap as they claim?

You really built a server for less than $200 with the specs you suggest? Maybe you upgraded an older system, or scrounged around different parts, and you had to dish out $200 for the extra parts, but not a complete system for that price.

Re:Virtualize

[nabsltd]

Does it bug anyone else around here when they boast about how they built systems for as cheap as they claim?

Yes, especially when they also claim the system is about 10x as powerful as it really is.

With 16GB of RAM and 12GHz of total CPU, each of his "45-50 OS's" gets about 364MB of RAM and 266MHz of CPU, with no accounting for overhead. I have 8-core/16-thread ESX servers that run 10-15 VMs at pretty much bare-metal speed, but that's the limit if there is any real CPU use on those VMs. Then, too, there's I/O contention. 40 VMs all writing to one SATA disk would be painfully slow (and you don't get hardware RAID that ESXi can use in a box for less than $200).

Not nearly enough information

[i kan reed]

It is not entirely clear what you want to tinker with. What do you want to test? Are you wanting to tinker with hardware? Using different software? Writing software? If the latter, what kind? To what end? This is a useless summary of your question.

Re:Suggestion

[fotoflojoe]

Hey, at least it wasn't goatse.

I give ESXi the thumbs down for driver support

[Gazzonyx]

I've had nothing but problems getting network hardware to work under ESXi. Three different NICs and none would work. It's very particular about what it will and will not support in my experience. If you're going to run ESXi, use Intel hardware all the way (chipset, CPU, NICs).