Setting Up a Home Dev/Testing Environment? 136
An anonymous reader writes "I'm a Project Manager (hold the remarks) who recently decided that I want/need to get my dev skills more up-to-date, as more projects are looking for their PM's to be hands-on with the development. Looking around my house, I have quite the collection of older (read: real old — it's been a while) PCs — it's pretty much a PC graveyard. Nothing that would really help me set up a nice dev infrastructure for developing web/database apps. So, my question is as follows: Should I buy a number of cheaper PC's, or should I buy one monster machine and leverage (pick your favorite) virtual machine technology?"
Simple... Get an Intel based Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Personally... (Score:2, Informative)
Vmware server is a free download as well. Or you could purchase workstation for a reasonable cost. Stock up on RAM though!
I'm testing ESX by installing it inside workstation then putting virtual machines inside ESX.
Another thought. (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Use Amazon's EC2 (Score:3, Informative)
Since you don't need boxes all the time and running using Amazon's EC2 seems to be the way to go:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ [amazon.com]
Also gives you the ability to experiment at scale, while paying $0.10 / hour.
Re:Virtual Machines (Score:3, Informative)
You just need a box with at least 5 bays, an external 5 drive hot-swap canister, a 'gaming' motherboard with a decent south bridge and a bunch of SATA ports, a few gigs of RAM and four or five drives (from different lots!). I setup a plain old Slackware box with iSCSI, carved up some partitions and threw them on to my network. The external hot-swappable trays are worth the $100 just for the ease of adding storage without rebooting or having to crack open the box.