The perfect whitebox VMWare ESXi setup

I was planning to throw in two 500GB drives and then do software RAID in the guest OS's. I want to make sure I can add more, however, so 4 SATA ports is a minimum - 8 would be nice. As for budget - since this is a home system, cheaper would be nicer. Say $80-$120 ish for the motherboard, and I'm not sure how much a lower end AMD processor goes for - but if a 64 bit dual core one exists for under $100 I'll take it. RAM is RAM, so whatever 4GB costs, I'll pay. It's been a while since I built a computer from scratch so I'm kind of 'out of the loop' so to speak in component pricing.  Storage does not need to be in the equation however as I have the drives already.

Many thanks,
Max

paulsolov, an interesting angle - I'll look into it. Do you know if the RAID adapter is "software" RAID, or actual hardware RAID?

Randy_Bojangles, do you have any recommendations of hardware that is on the HCL supports SATA with RAID? And as far as software RAID within the guest OSes...couldn't I assign two hard disk files to the guest OS... one which is on 'hard drive A' and another which is on 'hard drive B' and then so RAID1?

Thanks everyone for your comments! I appreciate your suggestions and I'm considering them - but I'm still open to building it myself...

For production use I would always recommend sticking with pre-built systems - believe it or not, they're usually cheaper too. If you're super keen on DIY (as I am), then stick with top-tier vendors and workstation/server grade hardware. You might get ESXi to run on an ASUS motherboard, but why take a risk. I'm also looking at doing this. Below is pretty much what I'm planning on getting - use or not, your choice.

Intel Server Chassis SC5299-E (BRP) w/ 650-Watt PFC Power Supply, Redundant Ready
Intel 650W Redundant Power Supply for Server Chassis SC5299-E (BRP)
Intel Core"2 Quad Processor Q9550 2.83GHz w/ 12MB Cache
2x Kingston 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 ECC FBDIMM CL5 Kit, Single Rank (Total of 8GB RAM)
Intel Entry Server Board S3210SHLX (Dual Gigabit, 6xSATA RAID ports)
Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adapter (total of 4 Gigabit ports)
Intel 6-Drive Hot-Swap SATA/SAS Kit (Non-Expanded) for Server Chassis SC5400 / SC5299-E
2x (or more) Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10,000 RPM SATAII w/ 16MB Cache

The above comes to about $3,500 CDN - might be cheaper if you shop around, but with ESX's narrow hardware compatibility, it's really a case of buyer beware!

Compared to this, you can get a Dell PowerEdge 1900 (which is on the HCL) with a PERC controller (with 256MB cache and hardware RAID), 2x146GB 15K SAS drives, and most importantly, 16GB of RAM and dual Quad-Core CPUs (16MB cache total, 8x1.83GHz total). Get a 1 GB USB Flash Drive and write ESXi on it, and away you go.

That being said I have had ESXi working flawlessly on a pair of Dell Optiplex 755's as well (and I would assume it would work on any comparable hardware using a current chipset - the 755 uses a Q35 northbridge). One was running the free version of Open-E DSS (limited to 1TB) with 1GB of RAM, and the other running ESXi with no local harddrives and 8GB of RAM (which cost $50 at my local hardware dealer). A cheap gigabit switch provides an iSCSI SAN between them - get one that supports VLAN, and a single switch can serve both the LAN and SAN traffic. Worked pretty much out-of-the-box with no tweaking involved. Performance was great - even with the dual cores I had (not Quad - waaa!).

Anyway, hope this helps.

Hi,

I've just happend upon this thread and have an interest in it because I'm looking at getting a server up and running with ESXi to host various IPT applications (e.g. CallManager, Unity etc), for a lab.

I was looking (on eBay) for a Dell PowerEdge 2600 or simular, I know this isn't supported with ESXi and also I understand that although it may work the PERC controllers RAID configuration can't be monitored by ESXi.

Having just read this post I've discovered iSCSI (new to me!), and I have some queries.

As I understand it I need to get a PC to run ESXi (e.g. a Dell Optiplex 755) with no local disks and plenty of RAM (running ESXi from USB flash) and another (lesser) server running Open-E DSS?

• In this configuration is it the ESXi application that actually connects to the disks (via iSCSI) or do the virtual machines need MS iSCSI Software Initiator to connect at that level? 
• With regard to the Open-E DSS server can I connect multiple ESXi servers to a single Open-E DSS server or is it strictly a 1-1 relationship? 
• Regarding the ESXi server I assume I can install ESXi on a local hard disk rather than USB flash if I want to? 

Many thanks in advance.

Ian