Equipment for building test lab

High all,
I'm looking for a little input on the two options I'm weighing for building my virtual test lab. If at all possible, I would rather not have my daily PC running my virtual lab, but I leave that option open. I'm thinking of purchasing a Dell PowerEdge 2950 II (from ebay), installing Windows Server 2008 R2, installing VM VirtualBox so that I can set up an Active Directory environment to prepare me for the MCITP EA exams. This option would allow me to conserve the resources of my daily PC. If I were to use my daily PC (I7 quad, 3GB RAM, 80GB SSD, and 1TB storage with only 200GB of free space) I would more than likely have increase RAM and buy another HDD to store the VMs. How much more trouble would it be to go the PowerEdge 2950 II route?

Thanks.

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Comments

Trashman

So what will happen to the Dell PowerEdge 2950 II once you have passed your exams?

If you buy more RAM to your daily PC at least you will have the benefit of that after you have passed your exams and can use that with your daily tasks.
And also you can "pause" your virtual machines when not in use to free up resources.

EyeCan'tCode

I really appreciate your reply. You make a very valid point and I will take heed to your advice. Will 24GB of RAM be sufficient for every lab to be performed en route to MCITP EA?

Trashman

You will need to compare exam objectives to figure out which tasks you are required to practice to be ready for exams.

It depends really on how many Virtual Machines you want to run, what they are and what they are doing.
Your main consideration is going to be how much RAM you need.

It isn't production so you don't have to give everything loads of RAM but giving them enough to run properly is always good.
Other than that just make sure the processor supports virtualization.

Windows 2008 Minimum Requirements:

1 GHz (x86 processor) or 1.4 GHz (x64 processor) CPU
512 MB RAM
10 GB Disk space

binarysoul

Go with virtual lab; this way you also get some experience with virtualization.