Cheap way to practice clustering?

[Thomas Cameron]

Hi all -

I posted about using firewire for clustering practice a couple of days
ago.  It turns out that this apparently requires a special, very expensive
firewire solution.

So I want to play around with clustering (as in high availability
clustering a la Red Hat Cluster Suite, not computational clustering) at
home so that I can become more proficient.  The problem is, I don't want
to buy a multi-thousand dollar SAN for my house.  I wanted to find a way
to do clustering on the cheap.  I am not sure what path to take, so I am
going to toss it to the list to see if anyone has any suggestions.  I am
totally open to older/used equipment.

>From what I've been told, I need a storage device which is multi-host
aware, so plain old firewire or even SCSI JBOD won't do.  I've been
looking at the specs at
http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/cluster/hardware/.

I'm leaning towards VMWare at this point, but I'd rather do it for real
than in virtual machines.

Any pointers?

Thanks!
Thomas