Virtual Learning Platform

Arthalen · 2 Jan 2012 at 19:25

Looking at expanding my skill-set come 2012, so will be moving on from purely networking and expanding my technical skills for AD, Exchange & SQL primarily.

So i'm looking for a recommendation on a virtualisation product to do some home study on the above 3. Virtual-box? VMware Workstation? Something else?

I may take some MCITP exams later on or whatever, but it mainly to get a good handle on the technology involved, and how it actually works.

I have a great gaming PC right here, I7 950, 12GB RAM and will shortly have a decent 900GB of RAID5 space to work with. So I have the necessary oomph to run a bunch of concurrent Virtual machines.

I'll be looking at doing some proper virtual stuff later on, and for that I will have a separate box for it all, but for now I don't want to invest in seperate hardware.

Arthalen · 5 Jan 2012 at 19:53

Thanks for the feedback, chaps.

I'll look at VMware first then, simply for the possibility of using a Hypervisor in a vm environment for testing/practice purposes. If it doesn't pan out, or the boss doesnt want to pay up for my 'learning expenses', I'll stick with Virtualbox and be done with it I think.

Arthalen · 6 Jan 2012 at 13:33

All good points, Razorblade. Gonna go pick up that extra 12GB tomorrow as well for some comfort zone on memory allocation too.

Arthalen · 9 Jan 2012 at 11:06

Well, 2nd set of 12GB ram ordered, so will have 24GB to play with tomorrow hopefully. After topping up 6-7 Virtual Machines with 2GB each, that 12GB ran gets eaten up pretty quickly!

I've also settled on VMware for time being, although that mini ESX mITX box looks interesting as a future project if I need a 'bare metal' box for my hypervisor learning needs.

There's plenty for me to get through this year alone to be honest, before I get to the Virtualisation study side of things