I got a really good deal on some Dell servers. The T105’s were on special offer starting at just 99GBP, and even with 3-year support contracts and 4GB RAM I managed to get both for less than 500 GBP (+VAT). That’s a pretty good price for four cores of 64-bit computing.

The plan is to put Solaris b81 and xVM on at least one of these, and either Solaris or Linux on the other.

The main reason behind that is to get on top of some Solaris and Linux development work, but also to try and do some heavier testing on these platforms and try out some scalability solutions like DRBD and memcached. I’m hoping that as a testing environment, this solution will work out better from a performance and practicality point of view than using Parallels or VMware to run the test hosts.