Sorry, I should also say that I would like this system to be usable and perform reasonably. It will host my virtual environment (2 DCs, an exchange server, SCCM server, couple of linux servers).
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Specifying hardware for a study VMWare ESX 3.5/4 server for home network
I want to build a VMWare ESX server for use at home to study with, however I don't want to use server hardware due to power consumption and noise issues. I'd like to build one (or two) from desktop components but I'm not exactly up-to-date with PC hardware.
Can anyone recommend a good motherboard, CPU(s) and any required NICs or RAID controllers etc that would be suitable for this purpose and meet VMWare's hardware requirements for ESX 3.5 and 4.0? I'd like to keep my costs down below $800-1000US. I have a SAN for storage but would like to make use of onboard storage also, so please factor that in (not much, maybe 200GB).
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Answers
I believe you are looking for whitebox
Checkout http://www.vm-help.com//es
While the whitebox site is great for listing some of the supported boards, the problem you will run into it finding boards available as their list get outdated pretty quickly.
What I did out of frustration from the whitebox list wast:
- buy a 4GB usb flash drive
- load ESXi onto the drive using this set of instructions http://www.techhead.co.uk/
how-to-cre ate-a-boot able-vmwar e- esxi-usb -pen-drive - Take the usb flash drive and boot computers from it
- login via the console and run a script as show here in this vmware community thread http://communities.vmware.
com/thread /225290 - exa
mine the report to find it the board and all (or some components are supported.
See if you can track down an ML 115 with the right processor, and put in a supported SATA RAID card. There is an internal USB port that can take the a memory stick. I have built two of those in the last 10 days and it works very well. I am in the UK, but this site is where I get mine, so you may find someone who can supply something similar in your location:
http://www.serversplus.com
The NIC is supported by VMWARE without any changes.
If you don't want RAID, then the built in SATA controller works with VMWARE.
Simon.
I have something like this at home and have done it with 2 HP DL360 G5s off of Ebay. Using a single power supply it runs about $20-$25 electricity for SAN/NAS (Openfiler on a HPDL320 G5) and 2 hosts.
What I have done to keep the volume down is to buy a used 12U rack with soundproofing.
Total cost:
HP DL360G5 2x dual core and one 1 quad core - $400 each (4GB RAM each)
Additional 4GRAM per server $50 (total) on ebay
My $.02
.
If you are going to run Exchange 2007 I recommend at least 6-8GB RAM, on 4GB it's a dog for anything other than testing
The nice thing about the servers is that they still have a warranty for another year and have built in SAS drives (2x32) which is plenty for ESX and the SFF SAS drives are dropping in price
Here is my config. Speed is not of great necessity for what I do with it in my home office's lab.
See the screenshots below. Altogether, I think it cost me under $500 and that is because of the 2, 500GB sata drives I purchased.
- Picture-85.png
- 26 KB
4GB of RAM but my system can handle 8GB
- Picture-87.png
- 34 KB
dual port sata ctlr card Sil3512
- Picture-86.png
- 36 KB
500GB raid1 storage
- Picture-88.png
- 34 KB
two dual port intel NICs
- Picture-83.png
- 45 KB
my guests and virtual networks
- Picture-84.png
- 29 KB
My detected mobo/processor and specs
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by: paulsolovPosted on 2009-11-06 at 22:14:09ID: 25765176
In leu of physical hardware you can get a decent workstation with a CPU that supports Intel VT, decent drive, and 8GB RAM. You can install several ESX hosts as VMs, vCenter, and a VM such as Openfiler that you can setup as iSCSI SAN to hold the VMs.
This will let you test HA, DRS, FT, etc.. and doesn't requrie ESX host HCL hardware