Table 1. Known working hardware configurations

Of course, you are free to purchase other systems. There are also various "whitebox" vendors that sell 1U rack mount servers with SuperMicro motherboards. These systems support secure network remote power cycle using an IPMI 2.x compatible add-on card and tend to be less expensive than the name brand systems mentioned above. However, your milage will vary with respect to reliability and driver compatibility.

To test whether your hardware is supported by PlanetLab, try installing Fedora Core 4 prior to installing PlanetLab. The Fedora Core 4 installation will be erased by the PlanetLab installer, but successfully installing Fedora Core 4 almost guarantees that the PlanetLab installer will run successfully.