Can I intall ESXi on normal Desktop hardware?

Virdi

Virdi

Virdi

Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2004
Posts
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Middlesex, London
Hi all,

I am looking to build a small rigm (Home Server Type of box) to have a play with ESXi.

I have some old hardware lying around ......(core 2 duo) and I also have Z77 and 2500k CPU now.

Will ESXi run ok on this hardware?

Thanks
 
Probably not, the thing that is almost always the issue is the NIC.
However, a compatible NIC can be gotten pretty cheaply, but I'll leave you to your own research on that.
 
The hardware supported is restricted to server oriented kit and they tend to drop older hardware quicker.

However it's free to download so why not give it a try.
 
Should work, I have a Z77 (ASRock) / i7 2600 ESXi server and the onboard NIC works fine (Broadcom I think). Make sure you double check supported NIC's as it will cause random crashes / reboots.
 
Thanks guys! I will have to give it a try

Does anybody have any good links to getting started?
 
I run ESX successfully on old desktops, perfectly adequate for learning or as home test rig. As stated the NICs are an issue, as rule go for Intel NIC's.

Failing that you can run VMplayer either on Window 7 or Linux and then run ESX as a virtual machine (ESX5, 5.5 and 6 work this way). Again perfectly adequate for learning or home test rig. If you have a beefy system say an i7 system then you can run two or more sessions of VMplayer each running an ESX version. Great for testing Window clusters ,HA and such.

VMplayer seem to be compatible with most NICs including Realtek range which you can pick up for a £5 note.

As long as your CPU supports Visualization then you will be fine!
 
i run esxi on HP 7900, HP 8000's HP 8200, Dell Lattitude E6230 (it has a broken screen)
and it runs fine. the only issues normally are :
1) Ram Requirements (but there is a hack and work around for this)
a) file hack Or
b) install to usb then boot from usb on a host that has less than 4gb ram

2) NIC support, But the community has some tools and drivers to support a wider range of NIC cards, or you just by a cheap supported Nic Card.

3) enabling the VT and Passthrough hardware under bios if you have the options

Motherboard will determine some of the requirements though as it has the on board hardware
i'm not using the newest esxi though i'm only using 5.5.
 
You can run esxi in windows vmware workstation and i think virtual box, good way to test it out without having to use hardware. You can then install the vsphere client and connect to the host from your windows machine.


I have been thinking about creating an esxi machine and running pfsense from it and use a nas with it.
 
anything I don't mind said:
You can run esxi in windows vmware workstation and i think virtual box, good way to test it out without having to use hardware. You can then install the vsphere client and connect to the host from your windows machine.

I have been thinking about creating an esxi machine and running pfsense from it and use a nas with it.
Click to expand...

Similar setup to my test rig, pfsense is great I use it to provide VLAN separation in my test environment, firewall and as a VPN server. I use NAS4FREE as my NAS which happens to be virtualised on the same ESX server. I pass through the HDDs (4 * 2TB) directly through to the NAS VM, then I've setup a ZFS array with a 30Gbyte SDD as a cache drive. Works fine for the test work I do. The only down side is that NAS4FREE does not support iSCSC-3 persistent LUNs, well the version I have, it's been a while since I built the rig!

Maybe a subject for another thread but does any one use a virtual network accelerator appliance? I would like to investigate ways to accelerate WAN traffic between two remote servers? I know you can use pfsense VPN tunnel with compression but I'm looking for something to use with Openswitch?
 
What server hardware do you use and how is the raid done? I was thinking I might be better off using a separate nas rather than localdisks. If not I could use a raid card but then limited to 4 disks. OK I see you used zfs. One option is used flex raid. That way I can keep the data on the disks.

Also I wonder if the pci-e WiFi card would work in esxi and pfsense.

In the end I may be best with 3 machines but would be great to have one only.
 
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anything I don't mind said:
What server hardware do you use and how is the raid done? I was thinking I might be better off using a separate nas rather than localdisks. If not I could use a raid card but then limited to 4 disks. OK I see you used zfs. One option is used flex raid. That way I can keep the data on the disks.

Also I wonder if the pci-e WiFi card would work in esxi and pfsense.

In the end I may be best with 3 machines but would be great to have one only.
Click to expand...

I use a AMD A10 cpu and a motherboard with A88 chipset with 16Gbytes of RAM. It has 6 SATA ports. Both the CPU and motherboard I bought from the OcUK clearance section. The CPU is not ideal for virtualisation but it does the job I require. I used the software ZFS RAID as supported by NAS4FREE. Unless you have descend RAID controller I would stay away from using mother hardware RAID setups, they are not true hardware RAID controllers!

PCI-e wifi card, I tried this with one I had spare. ESX allows PCI pass through, only the more modern chipsets support this. The A88 chipset does support this. The problem I had is that pfsense picked up the PCI-e Wifi card but had no drivers, at the time I didn't know FreeBSD very well so I didn't know how to install the drivers.

So you need to select a PCI-e Wifi card that is supported by pfsense as default or learn how to install drivers!
 
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