Cayenne8 writes "I want to observation at home with setting up mixed VMs and installing sofware such as Oracle's RAC. While I'm most drawn at this time with trying things with Linux and Xen, I'd also like to trial run* with things such as VMWare and other applications (Yes, even maybe a windows 'box' in a VM). My main quiz is, what to try to get for hardware? While I have some money to spend, I don't want to, or need to, be laying out serious bread on server room class hardware. Are there some used boxes, say on eBay to look for? Are there any good solutions for new user level accouterments that would be strong enough from someone like Dell? I'd be lured in maybe getting some bare bones boxes from NewEgg or TigerDirect even. What kind of box(es) would I need? Would a quad core type processor in one box be enough? Are there cheap blade servers out there I could get and wire up? Is there a comparably cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have core big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."

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