MMS USB private cloud

Just wondering if any of you have used the MMS usb drive to build a demo private cloud.  If so, were you able to do on on a high power laptop? 

Get one of those Johan laptops and it'd work.  You see his rig?  And with his Sever 08 Dev Preview as host using disk deduplication, he's able to get lots of VMs on it.  So, high-power is rather relative.

Ha, I have seen his setup.  In fact, I have the EliteBook 8560w dual Quad Core and 16GB of RAM.  I run the corp W7 image though.  I still have the original 500GB SATA drive too.  Just curious if I'd be able to pull it off by swapping to SSDs.  You made a good point about Johan's setup, I think I should be able to swing it.  Now I have to get approval for the drives ;-)
 
I was just wondering if anyone has actually tried this on a laptop. 

I did it just for kicks.  I've got an HP 8760w with dual quad core i7, 16GB RAM and dual 256GB SSDs.  It's hardly fair to call it a laptop.  I've since blown it away and it's running Johan's ConfigMgr 2012 Hydration Kit.

Interesting, so did you run this with Server 08R2 on your laptop?  What was the performance like and how many machines did you end up with? 

From what what I remember reading, i believe that the script tries to load 8 system center server apps on 8 existing server2008r2 machines. I wonder if it is easy to modify the script so it only loads four of the SC server apps; because my laptop only has 8 GB of RAM with VMware Wks 8 (i can't use any work machimes). Or, rather than spend a lot of $ up front for a 16 GB laptop, maybe try $50 per month using a service like CloudShare.com; which would be the same amount of $ over 3 years - and the virtual servers are already configured with licenses - which saves time.

Has anyone been able to load less server apps (like 4-ish) on an 8 GB Laptop? Or has anybody tried using cloud vendor like CloudShare.com??

Thanks for the info Kurt.  If I'm able to swing the SSD drives by management, I'll give this a shot.  Would be a pretty cool portable lab for sure!