ESXI home server

Cooners · 1 Dec 2011 at 08:05

Hi

I'm trying to work out the best (and cheapest) way to build an esxi server at home. I will want to run 2 or 3 VM's from this and leave it on all day.
One will run Server 2008 with DHCP, DNS, etc
One will be set up as some sort of NAS box used mainly for streaming media
One will proberley have Ubuntu on it for downloading

Also will proberley have one of them running VPN and maybe backup documents from mine and my girlfriends PC's (nothing much just our photos, music etc)

Half the point of this is to learn about things like server 2008 and also to have an upgradeable NAS box and VPN accesable at all times.

I need it to be energy efficent as I will want to leave it on all day without making to much impact on the leccy bill and also would like at least 4 HHD slots but don't want it to big (I would like to keep it under the desk)

Any Ideas?

Many Thanks

Spooter · 1 Dec 2011 at 10:25

Hi Cooners,

A lot of people a buying the HP Microserver because of price but I wanted something with more power.

I have just ordered the below to do a similar thing to you. I already have a server like ITX case hard disks etc. Plus the new Sandybridge Pentiums are pretty good on power.

Biostar TH61 ITX SKT 1155 VGA DVI HDMI 8 Channel Audio ITX Motherboard
Intel Pentium G620 2.6GHz Socket 1155 3MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory Module CL9(9-9-9-24) 1.5V Unbuffered Non-ECC x 2

This was less than £140 to do..

jamesfreddie · 1 Dec 2011 at 18:28

Buy a HP microserver the offer has been extended and you can get one for £150, inc. 2GB ram 250GB Hdd. They are quite small and quiet. You can fit 5 HDD's if you mount one in the 5.25" bay. You can run Esxi off a USB thumb drive easily mounted inside. If you grab 2 X 4GB DDr3 sticks of ram you have a nice small box that only draws about 30-35W at idle with 1 HDD. If you go with a Pentium Dual Core you will spend about £160 more and end up with about the same specs. Also most mini itx boards only have 3-4 SATA ports. You will also find that the Pentium Dual core will pull 5-10 Watts more.

Spooter · 1 Dec 2011 at 20:26

The sacrifice is a very low power CPU though so that's why it wasn't an option for me.

The micro servers do look very nice though.

Cooners · 2 Dec 2011 at 07:52

Thanks for the advice, I gotta admit I have been looking at the HP microservers, but as Spooter has said the CPU is very low powered, would it be able to cope running three VM's?

paradigm · 2 Dec 2011 at 08:38

Cooners said:
Thanks for the advice, I gotta admit I have been looking at the HP microservers, but as Spooter has said the CPU is very low powered, would it be able to cope running three VM's?

Depends on what the VMs will be doing. Typically though the issue with hypervisors is the memory capacity and not the raw CPU power.

I've got one running a small lab absolutely fine (Hyper-V rather than ESXi).

Cooners · 2 Dec 2011 at 19:57

OK I think I'll go for the hp microserver, I'll stick 8gb of RAM in it and a couple of 2TB drives (when they stop charging the earth for them) for storage and use the 250gb drive for the vm's. So I was thinking of using windows server 2008 on one vm to be a domain controller and run dhcp, dns and vpn, the second vm will be for NAS and streaming media to my xboxs, I was thinking either freeNAS, WHS or ubuntu for this, and lastly one vm will just be a standard OS purely for downloading via Usenet and bit torrent, I was thinking either windows 7 or ubuntu. Does that sounds OK and what options would be best considering the limited cpu, I don't have much experience with Linux but if it would make this all more viable then I guess it would give me a reason to learn.