Announcement: Rent-A-Lab hardware upgrade

In January 2007 virtualization.info launched the first online infrastructure available for rent, featuring enterprise-class servers, fibre channel SAN, and fully redundant network equipment: Rent-A-Lab.

Today, due to its big success, virtualization.info is happy to announce a remarkable hardware upgrade to this facility.

Almost all existing machines have been replaced by 6 brand new HP ProLiant DL 380 G5, each sporting 2 powerful Intel Xeon 5300 (Clovertown) Quad-Core 1.86GHz processors with Virtualization Technology (VT-x) extensions, with 4GB RAM (which can be extended on demand), a couple of ultra-fast 72GB 10,000RPM SAS hard drives (if you don’t need the available SAN), and 6 network interface cards with TCP/IP Offload Engine (for testing heavy network workloads scenarios).

The management station has been upgraded too, now based on a rock-solid HP ProLiant DL 380 G4 with a 2 Intel Xeon 3.2GHz CPUS and 4GB RAM.

With such configuration (8 cores per machine) customers are finally able to extend their testing from VMware and Microsoft products to new virtualization platforms like XenEnterprise and Virtual Iron (including new Microsoft Windows hypervisor, codename Viridian, when it will be available), and perform meaningful comparisons on their own without marketing meddling and without breaking any vendors’ EULA.

So go on and check the introductory demo of Rent-A-Lab, its topology map, its equipment’s detailed configuration and obviously its price list. And book it today!