[How Many Vms?]

Hey guys sorry I have not posted anything in a while I have been busy trying to deploy this in a very organized way. So the first thing I had to do was decide if I really wanted to go ahead with this project given the estimates that everyone had given me in addition to my research. The answer was yes so I have been looking to price out some good i5 cpu's in an effort to get a cluster going and see if this would work in the way we want it to. The other thing was deciding what OS to use and I am still not sure on if I want to use Lubuntu because it works well but is rather slow at 256mb, at the moment I am demoing 4 win7 with 512mb and 1 Lubuntu with 256mb and I am using team viewer on all to rdp in. I wanted to do a test run with several machines and see how my one Machine will handle everything and so far with 5 VMs everything is running just fine. In addition to this I was doing some more research and most sites even very popular ones like YouTube and UStream allow for several connections from one given IP add so if we were to get several students at a local college to log in and stay on for streams or look up you-tube videos we posted they would count them all as different views. In light of this new information I concluded that the same amount of impact could be achieved with fewer computers. I am still working everything out but the fact that this can be done with fewer computers means that I am able to give out even 512mb per user and this makes everything work much better. So I know someone talked about bot-nets above and I thought this could be a great idea seeing that this is how they are used in the real world so what about creating my own virtual bot-net what do you guys think and how would you go about this if you have any article please share because I have little experience with this and I would love to get this going. I really like the idea of a command and control center so I can get all the VMs to go to the target site with only one command. again think you everyone for your input and sorry if i typed anything wrong it was done in a hurry...

[How Many Vms?]

Hey guys thank you for your input and for those insightful links. Let me first answer the question of the budget for the project and then I will give a little bit of the background story behind my idea of running this many VM's. So there is no real budget for this project because it is a proof of concept, the idea is to find the cheapest way of being able to run so many machines 24/7 for at least six months. So how did this idea come to be? Well A very good friend of mine was looking into hosting various events such as tournaments for games, motivational speaking, security talks and countless many other events and he thought it would be a good idea to stream them live over one of the so many sites available. So me being me and arriving at a very similar conclusion to Brian Brushwood's, the guest on this week's episode, that if "other people are watching" more and more will follow. Which by the way was so funny when I watched the last episode on Saturday morning. I was like yeah I have been saying this for a while and have tried, on several occasions to prove this theory in a real world scenario. So this is the next evolution of the concept ported over for a technology driven world. Anyways So when my friend and I discussed this he agreed and asked if there was anyway to generate views. Immediately I had the idea about the virtual machines. As previously stated each VM has to be running its own instance of Tor and has to be able to navigate to the URL (I also want to have all of this automated so all one has to do is start the machines). Please feel free to improve on the idea, maybe you have not had the best experience with Tor and want to recommend other free open source products, or maybe you have an idea for what OS to run. Yet still maybe you can come up with the best way to automate these tasks; in short what do you guys think, are there better ways to achieve this, or am I out of my mind? I also would like to incorporate that concept of crowd sourcing using Facebook and other social media to generate momentum but that is for another day.

Again thank you for your responses and for allowing me to pick at your brains...

[How Many Vms?]

Hey guys I have read the forums for quite some time now but this is my first time posting.

So hear it is I am trying to see what is the best way to run 100s of VM's at a time I am looking at running about 300 vms. My host can be either Ubuntu 11.10, Mint 12, or Windows 7. As far as for my guest OS' I would be running xp or any small Linux distro. The only real functionality that I need is that each guest OS needs to be able to run a web browser with flash and each has to be able to run an instance of Tor. I have a box with an amd phenom ii x6 t1090 overclocked to 4.4Ghz 16Gb Ram, I will be installing a new boot drive some type of raid 0 configuration with 2 ssd's and two 2Tb 7200 rpm hard drives for secondary storage. I figure I will be needing to make a cluster since I will probably not be able to run everything off of this one unit but I was just wondering what are some of you guy's ideas on how to make this work. Can I just use virtual box to run everything or do you guys think that Proxmox is the way to go?? One last thing what type of Internet connection would be best suited for this type of environment? I will be running this from my house so I cant get too crazy but eventually I guess we could migrate to a more enterprise friendly location.

As I said any input is greatly appreciated and if you have been doing anything similar share, why are you doing it and how are you deploying it.

Visionk1