ESXI Lab - AMD Kabini

Frozennova

Frozennova

Frozennova

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Any have any thoughts/opinions on using an AMD kabini based system specifically the Athlon 5350 as an ESXI host.

I'm comparing it to a Celeron N2807 Gigabyte Brix as they cost roughly the same with 8GB RAM

Plus points for Kabini.

Roughly double the CPU performance according to Geekbench (Similar single core but 4 cores vs 2)
PCI-E Slot (allows the option of either a 4 port gigabit NIC or Infiniband to maximise IO between host and ZFS NAS acting as the data store)
Expansion up to 32GB RAM vs 8GB
 
Random thread to reply to given the age.

And FX6300 is overkill for what I wanted, no need for that much processing power or power consumption
 
It's a double edged sword - usually AMD excel with expandability and features, but lack CPU grunt.

If the Kabini chips can take on the N2807, then it's probably a worthwhile investment. Brix PC's are good, but expandability is very limited. With the AMD board even in Mini ITX you're looking at a high RAM ceiling, PCIe and SATA RAID. Not to be sniffed at, for sure.

Only thing they will definately fail on is power consumption, even AMD's lowest power chips are usually much hungrier than their intel counterparts. :)
 
I moved from a microserver to a Kabini 5350 build. It would be fine for what you want - I ran ESXI and 3 VMs for a while, including a 6 TB ZFS pool, all on 8GB RAM with no issues at all. It also hosted my website and mail server.

I still run the system but it's now on Debian as I'm done playing with VMs for now.
 
I had a 5350 EXSI microserver running for a good few months with 3 x VM's running. I found it very good, however the HP Gen 8 Microserver came along with its hardware monitoring via VSphere, that whitebox solutions don't support. Although I don't think it would goto 32GB ram as you require.

I'd probably go for one of the cheap Pentium chips, micro-ATX board and a small server case with plenty of 3.5" HD slots with your requirements.
 
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