Per the recent FNT of similar vein, I've been trying to learn some basics about virtualization. The test system is an older Dell Precision 490 with 2xXeon 5345 (net of eight cores and basic VT-x support), an Nvidia FX580 graphics card, and 16GB of RAM (about to be upgraded to 32GB). It runs hot and loud, but is stable and sufficient for my budget (for now), seeing as how I salvaged the barebones and several hard drives from a corporate recycling event. So far:
1) Dropped a 160GB Velociraptor and a 1TB Samsung drive into the system. Installed Ubuntu 64-bit as a host OS, then Oracle VirtualBox, then got Vista 32-bit and XP 32-bit operating as guest operating systems. Tinkered with resource allocation and attempted, but have not quite succeeded, at cloning the Vista installation from fixed-size VMDK to VDI so I could resize the partition.
2) Dropped another 160GB Velociraptor and a 500GB Caviar Black into the system. Installed VMWare ESXi 5.1 as a host, installed vSphere client on my laptop, then proceeded to install Vista 32-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit as guest operating systems. Might throw in an XP install as well, since I have a couple extra Pro licenses available.
A good start, but I realize this barely scratches the surface of the topic. I haven't scripted anything, I haven't migrated a VM from one host to another, I haven't experimented with creating network shares between VMs, etc. I think what I need is some sort of tutorial or application target to study and attempt. Any suggestions?