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Most intelligent men would not state this, but I was fortunate enough to have my wife spending a week in Spain visitng her sister. This allowed me to pull a few late nighters and not only finish racking and cabling all the servers, but also custom cut and run all network cables (those that I could unplug for now anyways). To top if all off, I even got all 5 of my PE 1435's configured with various hypervisors.
A case of beer, a new pair of crimpers, and 3 new spools of different colored cable later, and I can finally say that the lab is done as it will likely be for a long time. There is a negative side effect that I wasn't anticipating being as big of a problem as it is....the damn thing is LOUD. My wife is going to be PISSED tomorrow when she comes home and can hear the humming of servers through the entire first level of the house. Fortunately, I leave for California before she gets home and only have to deal with her wrath over the phone. Overall, I think the ultimate outcome is that I will be calling an electrician next week to come over and run two more 20 amp circuits to the most remote corner of the basement.
 
As you can see, the end results are pretty good for a lab that exists in a basement of a hobbyist's house. From Top to Bottom, the components are:
- KVM Switch (Mounted in Back)
- Keyboard Tray
- Dell PowerConnect 6224 (Mounted in Back)
- Dell PowerConnect 5224 (Mounted in Back)
- Dell PowerEdge 1435 (XenServer Enterprise)
- Dell PowerEdge 1435 (XenServer Enterprise)
- Dell PowerEdge 1435 (VMware ESX 3.5)
- Dell PowerEdge 1435 (VMware ESX 3.5)
- Dell PowerEdge 1435 (Microsoft Hyper-V RC1) - Dell shorted me a faceplate!!
- Dell SC420 (Development iSCSI Server)
- Dell PowerEdge 2850 (VMware ESX 3.1) - I don't have rails for the 2850 so its sitting ON the 2950
- Dell PowerEdge 2950 (Production iSCSI Server)
Not only did I get everything racked and cabled, but i also installed the base hypervisors on every piece of hardware. I do not have any virtual machines, with the exception of the PE 2850 which has my current VM workload from before the new equipment arrived. I have Hyper-V configured to communicate with the iSCSI server, which was a very simple configuration. I also have XenServer mapped to the iSCSI server for its storage as well. This was not a trivial task, nor was it intuitive for my sepcific configuration. I haven't touched the ESX servers because I know I can configure those with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back.
I will try and post my initial reactions to both Hyper-V and XenServer in seperate posts tomorrow morning before my flight. Readers have left 2 comments. No.1 You lucky one :)
And your wife out of the house for a whole week, and a rack filled with toys.
I envy you!
Curious to hear about your experiences... No.2 Untitled
What are you doing that requires you to have three virtualization platforms live concurrently? Could you not multi-boot such as to reduce your need for servers?
Enquiring minds want to know...
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