ESX5i and Cheap CPU, Motherboard

ASE001 · 24 Oct 2012 at 15:31

Any one had experience of running ESX4i or ESX5i on the following CPU's?

AMD Trinity FM2 Series
AMD A4/A6/A8 Series
AMD Sempron X2 190 2.50GHz Dual Core Processor
Intel Celeron G530
Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge)

I'm after a cheap CPU to run ESX4i or ESX5i, hosting two Virtual machines 'NAS4Free' and 'pfSense'. Not very demanding virtual machines, so any of the above should do. Not sure if any of these CPU's support 'Virtualization Technology' or AMD's equivalent though?

Then I need to find a motherboard to suit the CPU, it will have to support at least 4 NICs (5-6 would be better) in total, 3 PCI cards plus the motherboard NIC. The PCI cards need to support VLANs (IEEE 802.1Q) and it would be nice if the motherboard NIC did, but not essential.

Just for back ground, NAS4FREE is being used as a iSCSI SAN host connected to my two Main ESX5i test servers (point to point). PfSense is a firewall (freeBSD) and I'm using this as a VPN host (and firewall) so I can connect securely from my customer(s) or work.

Many Thanks
ASE001

ASE001 · 24 Oct 2012 at 19:06

I have looked at ml110 range and even fujitsu, but looking to keep costs low. Motherboard, CPU and memory will cost me £120. I have case, Psu, drives etc. the ML 110 only has 4 drive bays, I need six.
Just need to upgrade the system I already have, which is an Athlon 3400 single core CPU and won't run ESX of any version. So it's only running NAS4FREE and I want to run psfsense at the same time.

ASE001 · 26 Oct 2012 at 08:48

Good point, something I've never needed to use until now. But may be useful when running a VM firewall?

ASE001 · 26 Oct 2012 at 09:24

Just done some searching on the old www and found that AMD FX and Opteron processors support VT-D and they call it IOMMU. The motherboard also has to support it too, glancing down the list it pretty much restricted to top end motherboards.

One thing I did notice which seems to contradict the processor list that I saw, the ASUS F2A85-V Pro (FM2) motherboard is listed? Unless the FM2 processors have the FX core?

ASE001 · 26 Oct 2012 at 16:48

From what I've read pass through is not limited to NIC's, but other hardware too?
Would nice if I could get a TV tuner card seen by the a VM?

Hmm got me thinking, USB can be passed through I think, a USB tuner may work?