I’m planning on putting together a pentesting lab this summer (it’ll give me something to do after I finish eCPPT in June and before I start OSCP in September).  Physical space is limited so I was thinking about using rack machines (each running several VMs of course), but now I’m wondering if it wouldn’t just be simpler (and cheaper) to get a few cheap notebooks and run VMs on them.

I’ve never used racks before, so it’d probably be fun to play around with one, but considering I don’t plan on having my lab up 24-7, does anyone with more experience think notebooks would be a better way to go?  I’d like a lab that I can expand, meaning I’ll put more money into it over time, but I don’t see myself spending more than $800 initially.

Thanks for the help.

Rackmount systems are great for cramming a lot of gear in a small space, but you should either get a system or case that you can get your hands on first, or start with just one to check it out. I built a couple 1U systems for my lab a bit back, then ended up switching them to desktop cases. The fans in them were so loud that I couldn't stand to have them on for any extended period of time. There are steps that you can take to make them more quiet, but be aware that rackmount systems and cases are not generally designed with being quiet as a priority.

My current lab is a slightly hacked T60 Thinkpad (memory and processor upgrades). I run multiple virtuals on it. Just picked up a netbook that will be triple boot between Windows 7, Ubuntu and Backtrack

Have you looked at http://ultimatewhitebox.com/ yet? $800 will go a long way towards building a dedicated lab hypervisor.

Hi, I just bought a nice used ASUS netbook, 250GB HDD, 2Gb RAM, and 1.6Ghz CPU (i think if i remember correctly).  I was thinking about configuring it to run multiple OS.  Have you had any problems w/ yours running multiple OS?

Thanks~