ESXi Whitebox - ML110 G5 or ML115 G5
- Thread starter madman045
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You've mis-interpereted that a bit.
That's an MS fat american ass covering exercise. What they recommend is using different hardware so that should an update be released or soemthing that causes a conflict with a piece of hardware that conflict will happen on all your servers. Which is bad. E.g an update is released that causes a fatal error in the intel P43 Chipset, any servers you run that have P43 chisets will fall over. If they ALL have P43s your're screwed. If you mix and match P43 with NVidia equivalents you have resiliency to this as the NV ones will still work.
In the virtualised world if you use the same virtualisation platform for all DCs you'll get the same issue as to the guest OS the harware appears the same. So if an issue develops with Vmware ESX all servers running on ESX are affected, if that is all of your DCs, domain goes bye bye overnight.
Needless to say this doesn't matter in a test environment as nothing is riding on it.
I've just installed ESXi on an ML115 G5. No issues at all with the NIC. The onboard raid you can use as a sata controller (without RAID) but you cannot boot ESXi from it. Once it's booted however it's fine for drives housing the VMs.
I boot ESXi from a USB key (only needs a 1gb stick... think the actual footprint is 750mb) as per the instructions at http://www.techhead.co.uk/installing-vmware-esx-and-esxi-35-on-an-hp-proliant-ml115-g5-quad-core. This works fine.
I've installed 2 sets of Corsair XMS2 DHX 4GB (2x2GB) giving me 8gb of ram (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-184-CS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=813) and this seems to be working fine. The heatsinks on this do come very close to the sata connectors on the drive (the sata power cables about touch the top of the heatsinks for drives in bays 3 and 4) but they still fit without having to force anything.
Hope these few bits of info will be useful to someone!!
I'd appreciate a link for this via trust thanks
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As quiet as you want them to be surely? noise usually depends on what you put in them. Same as any other PC you put fan control in and you can season to taste in that dept. 99% of servers nowdays have fan speed control onboard so you can probably do this with software.
If you run diskless they'll have next to no moving parts so little else to manage.
You might have missed the boat by a few weeks, seem to be going for about £200 now.
I got one last week that was advertised for about 170... got a call not long after placing the order saying they had none in stock but as a good will gesture gave me the 3 year warranty version for the same price. As soon as i got off the phone the cheaper one was removed from their website.
I've not got much experience buying pre-built boxes, except for things like 1u or 2u things, which are normally quite loud. I know of an ML desktop at work which is jet-engine-like when it starts up, but practically silent shortly afterwards. I presume I could expect something similar from the ML115?
Cant comment on the ML115 but any other tower server i've come across has been very quiet under normal operation. They have thermally controlled fans so slow down drastically after a few seconds, but the fans are designed to keep the thing running if your aircon fails and the vents to the case are blocked 
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Cant comment on the ML115 but any other tower server i've come across has been very quiet under normal operation. They have thermally controlled fans so slow down drastically after a few seconds, but the fans are designed to keep the thing running if your aircon fails and the vents to the case are blocked
You can fudge this a bit by setting the target temps quite high which will make the fans spin slower, and make sure it's got plenty of airflow around it.
In the end if it's a problem they are in realisty just (120mm i think) case fans and you can replace them with ones designed for low noise rather than massive CFM.