ESX Build

Sharlaw

Sharlaw

Sharlaw

Associate
Joined
4 Jul 2008
Posts
806
Location
UK - Maidenhead
Hi Guys,

Looking for some advice for an ESX build.

This is going to be used to demo/train on some appliance software.

This will be running roughly 10 VM's of this appliance software.


Each hardware appliance usually runs a Xeon E31220, with 4 Gb Memory.

But for this purpose the memory could be scaled down to 512Mb-1Gb Per VM.

Disk speed is important so ideally an SSD for primary Storage.

Thanks in advance :)
 
I don't have any components for you but from experience, the most important thing with an ESXi build is making sure that everything is on the VMware HCL.
 
Would be ESXi, as would need to be taken on site for training at customer locations.

A PE2950 may be a bit on the large size, was hoping to get something that would be able to be taken on site.
 
I run an HP ML 110 G7 for ESXi here - it comes in various guises but I believe it will take up to 32GB RAM (I have 16GB in mine) and uses the Sandybridge chipset (I have a lowly Pentium 840). There is a thread on here about them: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18410198. I had no issues installing ESXi and upgraded it this year to 5.1.

The nice thing about the ML 110 is it's not too big, not terribly noisy (unless temp is above 23°C and then extra fans kick in) and it has SD card and USB memory stick slots on the mother board.

I run ESXi from a memory stick with VMs on a 1TB 7200 disk.

They are still available from certain places. I got mine with cashback so it was an absolute bargain, but that offer is now finished.
 
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Check out an HP ML310e Gen8 or a Dell PowerEdge T110 II, both are available with the E3-1220v2 for around £400 - £450. Add 32 GB of 3rd-part RAM and a 256 GB SSD (use thin provisioning when you create the VMs), and you're good to go.
 
Transporting a server is not ideal especially with mechanical hard disks. Do the sites in which you train at have Internet connections? Personally I'd just remote back to wherever the server is located if possible or buy a cloud based solution but the latter would be quite expensive.

Ram is cheap but I wouldn't like to run 10 VM's on a 4 core Xeon and on a single SSD all at the same time...

Any particular reason as to why 10 VM's running the same software? Would say one application server and one terminal server not do what you are after?
 
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The VM's we'll be running are virtual load balancing appliances so will need 10 individual versions.
And yes I totally agree that carrying a unit like this far from ideal, but most of the sites/customers we will be dealing with are really locked down and this way we can have a pre-built training environment we can bring in and keep disconnected from their internal systems.
 
Maybe a couple of decent laptops with 16GB RAM each? Much easier to carry around and setup.
 
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