Building a home lab

Has anyone ever thought of taking advantage of some of the deals like this at tigerdirect.com?

IBM ThinkCentre M52 8215 Desktop PC - Intel Pentium 4 3GHz, 1GB DDR2, 80GB HDD, DVD-ROM, Windows XP Home (Off-Lease) at TigerDirect.com

I would like to get a few machines for a home lab. It is for nothing specific right now. I would just like to maybe run a VM one machine, maybe test a piece software on another. I have my current desktop for everyday use and just picked up a new laptop last fall for school.

So I am looking for cheaper machines that would only see use for labs. Your thoughts on machines like the one listed above?

Thanks guys

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RobertKaucher

If you buy a few of these you will end up spending around $650. Why not just spend a little more and get a good Systemax server with a decent amount of RAM and run ESXi?

I'm not sure what sort of experience you have, but this would give you some hands on with server hardware and virtualization.

Hyper-Me

I got an inspiron 580 with a 3.4Ghz Core i5, 8 GB DDR3, 1TB HDD for 400$ from Dell Outlet after a 15% off coupon (which they run pretty frequently)

Its plenty powerful enough to run Hyper-V or run Windows 7 with VMware Workstation on top. It didn't like ESX's stringent hardware detection, though.

cgrimaldo

RobertKaucher wrote: »

If you buy a few of these you will end up spending around $650. Why not just spend a little more and get a good Systemax server with a decent amount of RAM and run ESXi?

I'm not sure what sort of experience you have, but this would give you some hands on with server hardware and virtualization.

That's a great idea. I just liked the idea of having different boxes as well. I intended on having some more heavy duty machines like you listed but also some machines like the one I listed for that reason. I appreciate your input.

RobertKaucher

cgrimaldo wrote: »

That's a great idea. I just liked the idea of having different boxes as well. I intended on having some more heavy duty machines like you listed but also some machines like the one I listed for that reason. I appreciate your input.

Also consider your energy bill.

DevilWAH

RobertKaucher wrote: »

Also consider your energy bill.

This is why you ask work ever so nicely if you can had a small rack in the corner of the server room. Then get a remote connection in