I've been evaluating VM's on second hand servers from Ebay. We got a HP ML110 G5, dual core Xeon 2.3GHx, 8GB RAM, 4 off 250GB disks and two network ports all for £110, bargain. Processor supports VM's, but not SLAT, so not the nippiest and 8GB RAM is limiting, but £110....
Been using Server 2012 R2 running Hyper-V evaluating virtualising our real servers and work loads at work.
In fact worked out really handy, as one of our real servers died (motherboard !!) and it happened to be a HP ML110 G5, so lost my test server, but company SQL database was up and running in under an hour. Ordered another two from Ebay £140 and £180, one had only 4GB RAM and not so many disks. Also an Adaptec 3405 RAID card (£55) to put OS on. Been using the two servers to test live migration of VM's and fall over.
Server 2012 R2 for 180day trial is available for download.
In fact the VM bit was not the most interesting bit of Server 2012 R2, the VM bit it just worked, the most interesting is data deduplication. Let it loose on our 5TB of files stored on our NAS (loads and loads of Windows images) and it came back with 60% saving storing in 2TB. Considering these are expensive SAS disks, that is a considerable money saving out of the box.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
