I was going to rebuke RTM for saying it costs $20 to download... but sure enough, there it is in black and white
ah well... mores the pity. Grab the Solaris 8 x86 binary, burn it to disk, and pop it on a spare machine.
Confidence grows by leaps and bounds once you start scripting, so my vote goes there too.
If you want hardware, prices have dropped significantly on the Ultra5s, you can grab a 256MB 333MHz boxen for a good price. PCI/IDE internals, no SCSI, but they will run Solaris 8 nicely.
You can go uber cheap and get a Sparc5 (recommend at least 128MB mem, 170MHz cpu), but they are very long in the tooth, and I can't see running anything over Solaris 2.6 on them. They have 13w3 monitor plugs, so that adds the cost of an adapter or new monitor.
Solaris 8 integrates disksuite, a volume management tool. If you go the Ultra5 route, get a cheap-o SCSI card, some cheap-o drives, an external drive enclosure (I hear cardboard works pretty good
) and play around with raid...
www.sun.com/blueprints, docs.sun.com,
www.sun.com/bigadmin and
www.sunfreeware.com are good leaping off points... only book recommendations I'd give are the Sun Blueprint books... otherwise, everything you need is online.