Got tired of messing around with real hardware old and others..
Decided to spend some $$ for a QUAD-core dual cpu laptop with 8 gig of ram and 1 TB disk space..
running VMware workstation 10 on windows 8.0 , with a pair of solx86 vcs 5.1 cluster and a pair of rhel 6.4 vcs 6.x cluster..
using openfiler as a lun masking tool, ...
so far so good, quite stable, more of a learning curves on openfiler and iscsiadm protocol to get things write..