Community Lab – WE NEED YOUR HELP!
We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
We need your help in spreading the word. In order to make this lab a success we are hoping that the community will help us with donations. I have created a donations page located at http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/donate/. This page will be updated soon with a link to make financial donations but we will also need equipment and other donations. If you or someone you know may be interesting in help by donating please share the word.
I will be posting regular updates as to inform everyone on the progress of the lab and I have many other things in the works to help support this. We will soon be rolling out a forum site for this initiative as well as some other services to help make this something great.
Please share your comments I would like to hears opinions on this service.
Thank You,
Sid Smith
The Community Lab – WE NEED YOUR HELP! by Daily Hypervisor, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Waiting to see a wish list to see if I can help out.
Would it not be easier to use virtual servers in the cloud instead of physical servers?? Then you only must cover hosting costs rather than hardware costs?? This way you could start with one server, then eventually scale up etc. Also a freemium model may work better??
I have considered that but this model basically will make us the cloud provider and give us more flexibility. In Gen 2 the goal is to give availability to bare metal so testing can be done around hypervisors and the such as well. As it matures and as utilization warrants a freemium model may be considered but for right now the goal is to provide a testing/play ground for those who don’t have access today at no cost.
Hi, I’m interested in participating!
I will register soon to your site.
I will gladly provide feedback and, if you think that I can help out…I’m here!
I have a suggestion, if you have any beefy servers (4 cores or more and more than 6 GB of RAM or so), you can run Nested ESX to have more ESX instances. That should stretch your resources further. Looking forward to see how this evolves. Good luck!
The servers we are starting with are quad-core 8GB of Ram. I am considering the ability to have users deploy nested ESX servers to utilize as a means of testing ESX however it won’t help with Xen, KVM, or Hyper-V. Thanks for the suggestion.
I’m linking this in my blog. You’re doing the community a great deed, Sid!
I am interested in participating!
Awesome! Sometime next week I’ll reach out and fill you in on the “grand plan” I’m very excited about this and think it’s going to turn in to something great!