ESXi Homelab - What do you use?

DiscoDave

DiscoDave

DiscoDave

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I'm after a ESXi lab to test various things including vCloud Director and therefore need a reasonable amount of grunt.

I only have 12GB of RAM in my gaming system, which doesn't seem enough. Ideally I'd need 24GB/32GB for everything.

I have a NAS i can present iSCSI volumes over so that's not an issue.

I also would like something that's energy efficient as i'd want it kept on most of the time.

I'm debating between a sandbox machine with a i3/i5 processor in it, loaded with RAM and nested ESXi, however I'm also considering getting a couple of these Intel NUC boxes, I've seen I can get a barebones i3 NUC for about £200. I was thinking a couple of these, each with 16GB of RAM. It would be slightly more expensive than a whitebox machine, but the power draw would be significantly less.

Good idea? Terrible idea? What are you fine people using?

Thanks :)
 
Saundie said:
I have an Asus C2750D4I with 32GB RAM running my home Hyper-V lab. It runs a lot quieter than the Mini-ITX i5-3570T/16GB system that it replaced, and I suspect it uses less power as well. While it doesn't perform quite as well as the i5, the additional memory allows me to run far more VMs - I am currently learning SCCM so I have five servers and five clients running simultaneously without any slowdowns. Admittedly it took a long time to install SQL, but otherwise it's difficult to tell the difference between the eight Atom cores and the quad core i5 it replaced.

A quick check online suggests that ESX supports the motherboard, though you need to add the drivers for the onboard Intel NICs. Support for nested virtualisation may also be a bonus, if you care about such things. One thing that I haven't been able to get to work properly is the IPMI. It worked fine for the first couple of weeks, but now I cannot connect to it at all. It is potentially a very useful feature if you're running the box headless, as you can connect to the console remotely via a Java application and do all the usual management stuff such as powering the system on and off, and some things I've not come across before, such as mounting an ISO to a virtual optical drive.
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Thanks for your reply, it sounds like it has enough grunt for what I need it to do :) - also I can't find a ASUS product with that model, did you mean asrock?
 
Yup, looks like just the ticket. I see on the supported memory list the Kingston KVR16N11H/8 is listed as supported, I have a memory kit from Kingston listed as KVR16N11K2/16 (was going to put it in a microserver) if its supported then I'm sold as that's £100 saved on memory.
 
I just found out that A Xeon E3 1240L (25W) with a motherboard would be slightly cheaper than a C2750 board and CPU. Is it a no brainier to go with this compared to a C2750 setup? if TPD is considered accurate, It appears this won't use that much more power and will be quicker.
 
Saundie said:
If the Xeon motherboard supports 32GB and it's cheaper than the Atom board then I would probably go for that - I can't find any direct comparisons in terms of performance, but I'd expect the Xeon would be more than twice as fast as the Atom while using only slight more power.
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As the Xeon is socket 1150 sourcing a small motherboard for it is quite easy and cheap - circa £40. I picked a half decent one at random (4 full length RAM sockets) and the specs from the manufactures site confirms it can take up to 64GB of RAM.

My boss has also given me a quad port PCI-Express NIC from an old server, so win win :).
 
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