ESX Server @ Home

stueng

stueng

stueng

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Hi, Im looking to build a rack mountable ESX server at home. Because its at home there are power and noise considerations.

Rack mountable case

Dual CPU compatible, but starting with one CPU (is there such a thing as dual I7? or does it have to be Xeon? What about opteron?) Would be ideal if the onboard NIC is ESX compatible?

Able to take PCI/PCI-E ESX compatible NIC

Would like to start with one stick of RAM but with upgradeability in mind, so one large stick

No HDD necessary will connect to QNAP NAS over iSCSI or NFS

Budget - £800


Any ideas? thanks in advance!
 
the focus is more on learning vmware than it is on running the VM's so it doesn't need to be extremely powerfull, but it needs to be functional
 
you are going about this the wrong way..

i5 cpu - 4 ram slots - 4x8bm of ram... the cheapest setup you can lay your names on... you will probably get two for your budget...
vmware with no load will run much better on lots of ram than a much faster cpu...

if you want to see what the hyperthreadding does on vmware, get an I5 for one system and an i3 for the other...
 
well its for a friend not me.. he is moving his gaming machine into a 2U rack mounted chassis and building up a rackmount NAS and also wants a rack mount PC to run vmware on.. he has a 22U rack in his office
 
stueng said:
well its for a friend not me.. he is moving his gaming machine into a 2U rack mounted chassis and building up a rackmount NAS and also wants a rack mount PC to run vmware on.. he has a 22U rack in his office
Click to expand...

Utterly pointless at home - you're just adding the noise and power of rack kit for no real reason
 
Why dont you just go for something like a Microserver? I am running my ESXi Host at home on an Microserver NL36 8GB RAM, booted/installed ESXi on to USB using the onboard USB port (on the motherboard)
 
hes learning vmware for business use really.. hes going to be deploying a massive vmware project soon so he wants exposure to running it on a proper server with multiple NICs, VLANS etc
 
Just get a single i5, 32GB of ram and some local storage. If you want to learn ESX then you can nest ESX and have multiple nest hosts running and even present the local storage back into the VMs again via iSCSI etc...
 
I've got a Dell 2850 form my storage and 3 HP NL40s (they were £120 each with 8gb memory upgrade), you kinda need several machines if you want to play about with vmotion, high availability and fault tolerance.

MW
 
Mr-White said:
I've got a Dell 2850 form my storage and 3 HP NL40s (they were £120 each with 8gb memory upgrade), you kinda need several machines if you want to play about with vmotion, high availability and fault tolerance.

MW
Click to expand...

Could you not do it all via a few VMs?
 
If your friend wants to do this for training and experience for a business project then I would suggest going for a ML110 G7 with an E3-1220. Put it on a rack shelf as I do with mine. You get two ESXi compatible NICs, an E3, upto 32GB ram (doesn't need to be HP branded) and, depending on the deals running in the UK, you may be able to get it bundled with a couple of 500GB WD RE4s like I did. This unit will also allow you/your friend to play with VT-d. The unit usually also comes with a 1 year on-site next business day warranty. There is also a wealth of fairly cheap HP spares available on EBay like quad port NICs, P410 SAS controllers etc. If a actual rack chassis is required then you can look at the DL320e G8 which features the E3 v2 but is more expensive, has less upgrade options (less PCIe slots) and will be noisier.

i3s do not support VT-d, i5s, i7s and E3s do. There is a quick link to which CPUs support VT-x here which also provides a good jumping point for the individual CPU specs covering the last 3 gens. A list of Intel branded boards supporting VT-d can be found here.

For multi-server functionality look at VMwares vSphere Essentials as a minimum. It is not free but it is significantly cheaper than other versions and allows for support of 3 vSphere hosts (nested or physical).

RB
 
Ol!ver said:
Could you not do it all via a few VMs?
Click to expand...

Yes. I have a complete VMware setup (3 hosts, freenas and vcenter) on my i5 desktop with 16gb RAM running in VMware desktop. Set the memory cap in desktop to force it to page, set the page location to the ssd and store the images on the 1tb HDD. Works flawlessly - wouldn't want it in production, but "needing" a server to learn on at home is 99% of the time just an excuse to play with something shiny.

What baffles me even more is a single VM on my desktop pc is significantly more powerful than the likes of the old 2850 that people insist on buying. I can't quite grasp people buying those as "toys" either, I'm working to throw out some 2950s at work, definitely don't have an itch to scratch there.

I've got exchange, lync and server 2012 labs installed on there too, all work just fine for learning - they're not production servers so little to no load!
 
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