Solved
ESXi Whiteboxes for Lab Environment
Posted on 2011-03-10
I am planning to procure 2 whiteboxes for my home lab environment in order to test DRS and HA The lab would run vCenter v4.1 and ESXi v4.1.
I had the intention to go for the hardware spec mentioned below
AMD Phenom II X6 1075T - 3.0 GHz
16 GB DDR3 1333 MHz
Asus M4A89GTD-PROU3 motherboard based on 890GX chipset
350 or 400W SMPS
1 KVA UPS
Antec or Cooler Master chassis
iomega StorCenter ix2-200 Network Storage - 1 TB - iSCSI SAN and certified by VMware
My doubt is would I be able to vMotion my VMs from one ESXi to another ESXi with the config mentioned above ?
I chose the 890GX chipset over 890FX since 890GX has onboard DVI, VGA and HDMI ports.
890 FX has additional support for IOMMU, which can be used for VMDirectPath config, although I am not planning to test this functionality.
Budget is not a constraint, hence I am willing to go for Opteron CPUs along with supported motherboards, but I am having difficulty in finding info about Opteron + motherboard combo over the net.
Should I go for an Intel Xeon CPU & motherboard combo since I am able to find plenty of info on Intel's website for CPU & Board compatibility.
Requirements
Support atleast 16 or 24 GB RAM
A single CPU socket (6 cores needed)
ESXi v4.X would be installed on a USB stick and all VMs would be stored on the iOmega StorCenter.
I have a 8 port Gigabit switch (unmanaged) which I can use for setting the vSphere Lab infrastructure.