Looking to setup a lab on a budget

dsgm

Would like some advice on a lab setup recently completed the stanley cc course and would like to setup a lab for studying can someone point me in the right direction

Currently i have 2 motherboards and about 5 hard drives
Advice would be greatly advised also am about to start studying for Linux +, do i really need for eg the dell poweredge servers i see most people investing, if so i may need to save up a bit more money.

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Asif Dasl

We are going to need more details than you have provided so far... So what RAM have you got? How much have you got to spend? Are you going nested or physical? Search the forums there is tons of lab threads and blogs with lab recommendations too... There is so many options it really depends on your personal preference, there is no one way of setting up a lab..

JeanM

You can probably get away with using virtualbox or vmware workstation... if you have enough ram/cpu and i/o and just need to spin up a Linux VM to play with.

Deathmage

Don't take my my lab as vebatum to what should be done for a VMware lab. I mainly just use Dell R610's since I'm used to working with them at work so I know them in and out.

However with that being said VMware 5.1 and above work better with hyperthreading so that why I lean towards Dual CPU servers, but a solid i7 with HT will do just as well just don't play a video game while it's running lol!

if you want a starter server, you can buy a Dell 2950 GEN III for $180 starting off ebay; it's a none HT processor but it works.

tstrip007

I if you dont want to buy servers..... I have a 5.1 lab with vmware view built in running on a single i3 desktop with 16 gigs of ram, 128gb ssd, 1 tb sata. Runs great inside vmware workstation.

macboy81

I use Vmware Workstation 10 on my pc and also i have Vmware Esxi running on a Micro PC i7 12gb ram, 2x500gb hdd works a treat for learning

ehnde

You can use vmware workstation and do a nested lab if you must, but if you have a box that can run ESXi do that instead! You may already know you can do a personal use license for ESXi so that you don't have to rebuild your lab server every 60 days. Put some SSDs in there too if you can.

Check out autolab, it's pretty cool: http://www.labguides.com/autolab/

dsgm

Thanks for replys

I have been considering the dell 2950 gen III on ebay i am watching and few and will be making some offers.

The budget i can work with is about 500 dollars
My current setup or components i have

A gigabyte motherboard with an AMD phenom 2 dual core 3.2 ghz with 8gb Ram capable of going to 32 gb of Ram
also another asus motherboard capable of 8gb

I think i should be able to purchase the dell server, some more ram, a case

elderkai

The Rackable Systems servers go for good prices on eBay as well. Less noise and power consumption than 2950.

jibbajabba

Make sure you have a look at the HCL as newer ESXi versions might not work with the older gen of servers. Some google hits at least show that the Gen 3 should work with the Dell customized vSphere iso of 5.5 ..