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janhoedt

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Best budget/green ESXi hardware for home LAB.

Hi,

What is these days the best ESXi hardware for a home lab (reasonable power consumption)?
Intel NUC, HP MicroServer Gen 8 ...?

I currently have HP Microserver with 16GB ram with 1,2 Ghz dual core CPU, so would like to upgrade to 32GB or 64GB and bigger cpu.

Please advise.
J.
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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janhoedt

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Can you advise on those whiteboxes?
These are not cheap whiteboxes....and not Budget!

But are new whiteboxes are based on

Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition 3.00GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011V3 Processor
8 x 8GB (64GB) 2133MHz DDR4 RAM


ASUS Dual Xeon Z9PE-D8 WS Motherboard
2 x Intel E5-2697v2 12 Core Processor - 2.7GHz
8 x 16GB (128GB) 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
Thanks! So what are prices for these then?
Typical laptop will have UPS included and let you reach 32GB RAM (same on Intel or AMD), just do a quick check if virtualisation extensions are present on CPU.
And if you have couple of extra bucks you can play games while ESXi-s spin in background....
gheist, can you clarify what you suggest?
A laptop with maxed out memory and virtualisation-capable CPU. It is a bit more expensive than microserver but less limited.
Then you run nested ESXi(s) inside vmware player or workstation (nesting needs all virtualisation extensions in CPU, not the simplest one - check vmware's pages on subject)
Best labs, are based on physical servers, and with a physical server, a MicroServer Gen8, VM Direct Path I/O can also be tested.

Also there are very few 32GB laptops available.
I agree, you dont have many PCI slots on a laptop...