Should have originally posted in this section:
Hi,I'm looking at buying as cheap a lab as I can get to be able to test clustering on server 2012, hyper-v clustering, SOFS and eventually Exchange.
I currently just use a desktop machine - i7, 18GB Ram, SSD etc for most of my virtualisation needs however I am obviously going to need multiple physical servers to be able to test this.
Originally I thought I would just build a couple of cheap machines - i5 processor, 16 GB Ram, 3 Sata HDD's etc for under £1k, but i'm struggling on finding the cheapest alternative for shared storage.
I watched some teched video recently about having 2 physical hyper-v servers in a cluster and then another 2 running SOFS cluster to provide the storage but they also said there was the option of putting the hyper-v and SOFS cluster on the same physical servers and so the number of physical servers required would only be 2?
I've then read that SATA drives will be not be compatible and will require at least SAS drives to be able to do this?
I'm looking at buying the parts pretty soon but I can't be spending thousands on testing this. I don't care about performance and reliability just want to learn the processes. So I would be grateful if someone could give me an overview of what would be required to be able to test this to see whether it would be feasible.
Thanks
