If you want to test drive your own private cloud, try Ubuntu Cloud Live. It’s a 600 MB image, just download, burn to USB drive, boot your system with it and you have a cloud setup.

Download the image from here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-cloud-live/releases/11.10/ubuntu-11.10-cloud-live-amd64.img

Note: This is a 64-bit mage.

Recommended to have atleast a 4GB pen drive.

Use the ‘dd’ command to copy the image over to your USB drive. For example, if your USB drive is connected to /dev/sdb,  then run `dd if=ubuntu-11.10-cloud-live-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb`. WARNING: THIS COMMAND WILL ERASE ALL DATA PREVIOUSLY STORED ON THE TARGET DEVICE. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE CORRECT DEVICE WHEN FLASHING.

Have fun 🙂