[crutchdrewfield]

I'm looking to start watching some CBTs, playing around with windows server, and pick up some MS certs. Ideally I would like to set something up at home to mess around with but as of right now I don't have any extra equipment just laying around.

What I would like to do is either build or buy a cheap home server setup and then use VMware ESXi(or server or whatever) to throw a couple virtual machines of server 2003 on that(a DC, file server, some other stuff to play with). Would this work? And since they'd be virtual machines would they still all have their own IP? Would I be able to RDP into them and use them just like they were stand-alone servers? It would just be a lot cheaper/easier this way than having 2-3 seperate machines.

[LinuxHacker]

You can do all of that. Thats the beauty of virtualization.

[crutchdrewfield]

Awesome. What kinda specs would you recommend for this home setup? I'll probably end up playing around with both 2003 and 2008. I know 2008 is quite a bit more resource intensive. As of right now I plan on having a DC, file server, and print server.

Could I install 2003/2008 as the main OS and use that as the DC, then virtualize the FS and PS? Or would I be better off loading something like XP professional and virtualizing all 3 servers?

[avisitor]

You'd be best off having the file server on the base system and virtualizing everything else.

Your most precious resource will probably be RAM. You're going to want at least 4GB-8GB.

[Colossus610]

You don't NEED to install a base Windows OS on a machine; ESX can be 'installed' as the base 'host ' OS and managed from another machine to configure virtual 'guest' Windows machines.
The thing with running the VMWare as an application on a base installed Windows Domain Controller, is that VMWare will create virtual NIC cards on top of the existing NICs on the domain controller, unless you're real careful with your NIC/IP setup and DNS, you can screw up ActiveDirectory/DNS registration for domain workstations and member servers, virtual or not.
As for performance, I have two HP DC5850 Small Form Factor PC's running VMWare ESXi, with an entire test domain running virtually.(I picked these up off of ebay for 200-300 bucks depending on the deal)
Granted, I have upgraded these to AMD Quad Core Opteron 1352's (with BIOS update) and 8 GB RAM, but that's just me.

One of my host machines is running two server 2008 servers(one 32 bit DC and the other 64 bit with Exchange 2010), another 2003 member server for messing with Sharepoint and an XP client This is about as nasty as I can get on that host without really pushing it.
By no means am I telling you to get what I got, I wanted the physically smaller Small Form Factor cases to play around with VMWare clustering/HA and didn't want two(more) big honking server chassis sitting in my office. I had to search for a SATA card that was supported under ESX.
I got a lot of helpful info for finding whitebox VMWare servers and HCL info here;
http://www.vm-help.com/

[crutchdrewfield]

I'll have to look into that. So what happens when you boot the computer? How would I go about using vmware esxi as a host OS? Here's what i'm thinking so far, mind you i'm trying to keep the price as low as possible since this is mainly just experimental. I may use it to back stuff up on the file server and probably setup a print server but that's about it. It'll have 3, MAYBE 4 clients connected to it.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...6265&CatId=329

I could build one myself but it'd come to almost $600, or I could just buy. Would 2GB of RAM really not be enough? I think it'd be plenty for 2k3 but what about 2k8? What do you think of that tower?

[LinuxHacker]

ESXi is Linux based. You don't do much configuration from the console. When you install you can setup an IP address. After it is complete you open a web browser and goto that IP to download and install the management tools. You do all the configurations from your normal PC. You can from there create virtual machines and manage them and console to them.

As for hardware resources, you allocate all resources to the machines. So if you have 2GB of RAM and 4 machines, the max each can have is 512MB of RAM.

If you run 3-4 machines with no SQL server and its just for testing I would recommend a quad core and 4 GB RAM. Each machine would get a CPU and 1GB of RAM.