I thought I'd share a photo up my cluster setup. I have 7 Sun V20z servers. They are older, but total investment is < $1500 so that is pretty good. 6 are dual-single core servers and 1 is dual-dual. I can upgrade 2 more to dual-dual, but I need a firmware upgrade that is only available on service contract now. Some of the servers have 4G ram with 2-36GB 10K rpm drives and the others have16GB with 2-73GB 15K rpm drives. That doesn't give me much storage space, but a lot of ram. That's good enough for the kind of testing I'm doing.
They are all running Solaris 10 U9 which is the first Oracle Solaris release. A couple of things I really like about Solaris are ZFS and Zones. Zones is an OS level virtualization technology. Zones are very lightweight and easy to set up and administer, especially in conjunction with ZFS. I currently have zones set up for Riak and Hadoop. I plan on setting up a number of NoSQL data stores and seeing how they operate, administer, and run on my cluster.
