Lab in a box
by Rohan on July 8, 2009
After playing around a bit at UOIT’s Hacker Research Lab, I decided that I needed (wanted) my own lab. Unfortunately, that was way too expensive. So, I decided to make my own lab..in a single box.
OS of choice: VMware ESXi 4.0
Now, I haven’t used any of their competitors products (Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft Hyper-V), but I must say that ESXi is quite easy to install, and to use.
Why virtualize?
Well, in my case, I only needed to have 1 box for an entire lab, including (soft) routers, a few servers, and a couple of clients to test out stuff.
This saved me so much money…especially in terms of power and equipment: instead of having several boxes, I have one box, with one power supply, that’s utilized very efficiently.
For those of you that are students like myself, and want to toy around with different operating systems interacting with each other, but don’t want to have the overhead of running several physical machines in your house, I highly suggest this.
If you’re not too sure on how to get VMware ESXi set up, just google it, there are a lot of tutorials for installing ESXi.
Just be careful about you’re hardware; make sure everything’s compatible with ESXi or whatever virtualizing platform you may choose to use.
Good luck!
