Comments on: My Midsummer Night’s Dream of A Virtual Lab http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7397/ Open Source, Open Standards Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:48:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: nrarnot http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7397/#comment-6609 nrarnot Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7397/#comment-6609 <p>\"This is where confusion sets in for unsuspecting, starry-eyed customers—they aren’t able to install the software on their existing hardware—even for testing. A virtual lab would solve this dilemma.\"</p> <p>For real-time testing the high-end stuff like VMotion, load-balancing, etc, that\'s true. For leaning about VMware or for developing things to run in the datacentre, it certainly isn\'t. I\'m accomplishing many useful things with VMware server (free) on a desktop system with Intel DQ35JO MoBo, E8400 CPU (2 real cores, 4 Hyperthread cores - a quad Q9xxx CPU would be better), 4Gb RAM (8GB upgrade is possible), CentOS 5.3 i86-64 host, Intel VT turned on in the BIOS (not essential), and an old PCI Ethernet card to give me an eth1 to play with. </p> <p>This isn\'t even top-end desktop hardware. That would be Core i7, 12Gb RAM (24Gb possible). </p> <p>The VMWare training course I went on was using real VMWare ESX but the datastore was just a bog-standard Linux server exporting via NFS. Too slow for production(?) but VMotion & load-balancing demo worked fine. </p> \”This is where confusion sets in for unsuspecting, starry-eyed customers—they aren’t able to install the software on their existing hardware—even for testing. A virtual lab would solve this dilemma.\”

For real-time testing the high-end stuff like VMotion, load-balancing, etc, that\’s true. For leaning about VMware or for developing things to run in the datacentre, it certainly isn\’t. I\’m accomplishing many useful things with VMware server (free) on a desktop system with Intel DQ35JO MoBo, E8400 CPU (2 real cores, 4 Hyperthread cores – a quad Q9xxx CPU would be better), 4Gb RAM (8GB upgrade is possible), CentOS 5.3 i86-64 host, Intel VT turned on in the BIOS (not essential), and an old PCI Ethernet card to give me an eth1 to play with.

This isn\’t even top-end desktop hardware. That would be Core i7, 12Gb RAM (24Gb possible).

The VMWare training course I went on was using real VMWare ESX but the datastore was just a bog-standard Linux server exporting via NFS. Too slow for production(?) but VMotion & load-balancing demo worked fine.

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