Re: [PLUG] cheapass VM host platform?

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com> wrote:

Lee Marzke wrote:

linc wrote:

Ron Mansolino wrote:

I'm thinking about upgrading on of my boxes at home, and I think I'd 
like to setup a VM host.
Mostly just to play with, but it'd be nice to back up my cloud-thingy 
and experiment with/on.
I'm not interested in cherry-picking a bunch of stuff to put together, 
I'd rather just snipe something off of eBay and be done with it.
what would you suggest (for example, a SOHO client, or for your lab)?
thx


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Well, what I did was go to geeks.com and picked up an inexpensive server 
(actually I bought 2 Appro 1U servers).  Right now they have a decent 
looking one for $130 
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=DL140-3R&cat=SYS.  Slap Linux 
and VMWare server on there and there you have it.  It'll take you an 
hour to get going maybe and works great here, in fact I run my entire 
infrastructure on VMs.  You can even run VMWare converter to convert 
existing hardware to VMs.

Just remember if you take a marginal box that is OK for one server
and try to run  3 or more VM's  you may not be happy with the performance.

If you want to run more than a few VM's you will quickly find
you wish you had more RAM.  So at least get a machine
that can hold lots of RAM.

You also want several 1GB Ethernet ports,  since the VM's will
be sharing these ports.

Also for hardware, make sure you end up with a CPU with virtualization extensions. AMD calls it AMD-V and Intel calls it VT-x. Not having that will cost you 10-20% VM performance, and take away some of the more interesting options like running XEN or KVM.

--Gordon

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