I was looking at a few old pictures of my old office at a small Third Party Processor (TPP) where I was Director of Development and Technology and that I lived in for ~8 years, that had a small test lab in my office. These are probably circa 2000-2002 or so, and it required to have physical machine to run different test systems back then. All were white boxes that I put together from parts, let me take a stab at what they did from memory:

Above: G3 IMac – required to test Mac Web Browsers for early web apps, in OSX and Mac Classic Windows 2000 Workstation – Dual Processor main workstation with was dual headed CRTs Probably two Linux Workstations – probably running debian 2.2 potato or Red Hat 7.2 – Enigma or Red Hat 6.2 Zoot or Solaris 7 or 8 for x86 – one was a dedicated linux workstation, and the other I installed every new distro of linux on I think

Above: Linux box where I first played with Netsaint, now nagios, snortd, and other sysadmin/network linux tools, and testing many open-source projects. I might of ran CVS on this as well. Linux Web Server Apache Windows 2000 IIS 5.0 Web Server Mysql 3.23 Database Server Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or 2000 Oracle 8.0 or 8i Database Server

Now I have an shuttle PC with 8 gigs of RAM and VMWare ESXi as a test server, and a Vista x64 workstation with 8gb of ram and VMWare Workstation for dev and a Black MacBook for travel with 4gb and VMWare Fusion.  I’ve consolidated a bit Oh, I also have a XEN instance of Windows 2003 on another Linux box    BTW,  I was an early user of VMware version 3.0 and used it to run Linux guests on my laptops, but that was when RAM was not so cheap, and these boxes had memory limits.

Virtualization rocks for development and testing.

Stratus Technologies, famous for fault tolerant computers, the operating system VOS, and its newer ftServers line that can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows Server 2003 is giving away a book offer on Fault-Tolerance and/or Virtualization for dummies.  Get your copies here.

Stratus has two Virtualization options one for its hardware, another product is a software solution for commodity boxes.  1) VMWare, using the VMWare Infrastructure 3 on ESX,  2) Avance, which uses Citrix’s Xen and other HA components to build a pair of HA Virtual Servers.