ESXi Whitebox VS Bought server, and other QNs

[Roland0]

Hey Peeps,

I will be soon be stepping up a gear with my Microsoft Qualifications. Armed with a Dream Spark subscription (and possibly Technet soon) I am going to get as close as I can to a self contained production environment. This will be an ESXi based server, running as many VMs as is practical. The budget is £100 (no more please).

So far I managed to spec up a Dell PowerEdge T300 to a reasonable spec. But I cant help thinking that I would get more out of a whitebox, like an SSD or a SAS card (or both! The disk system is going to be thrashed!). Whilst I'm not going to need all the VMs to run Crysis, I would want a reasonable speed with several VMS to run concurrently, (Sever 2k3 & 2k8) a DC (or two) File-server, WSUS server etc. Along with client VMs (XP, vista and 7). Raid isn't a must but I would much rather have redundancy as well as the speed benefits of having the data-store on a Raid (and why not with 500GB HDDs barely £40!).

The major drawback with a whitebox is ESXi compatibility, I don't want to be doing too much with fiddling with th e “oem.tgz” file too much. Although I don't mind doing a bit as I am Linux proficient (enough )

The only stipulations for the server are as follows:
A) that it has a Quad core CPU, 2.5GHz or above would be nice,
B) as much ram as possible 12GB would be nice, but perhaps 8GB.
C) It has a decent storage system, i.e. doesn't get bogged down with 5-6+ VMs
D) its less that ￡1000. (possibly a tad more but only if its really worth it) E) it works easily enough with ESXi 4.0, perhaps a couple of mods but I'M no going to spend days compiling or anything.

So should I go for a whitebox or a Dell or possibly(read preferably) a HP?? How many VMs will I be able to run simultaneously? (at a speed high enough to use easily it via RDP/TS)
Will I really need more than 8GB of RAM? (probably!)
Is it all that much trouble to change around the OEM.TGZ file?

If I can get help form someone who has done this, and/or has greater experience with running ESXi in a production environment, or is just a pro at speccing a computer up for ESXi, it would be greatly appreciated, cookies are available.

Cheers V. much!

 

[Roland0]

If you're going for Microsoft Certification, might it not be a good idea to go down the Hyper-V route instead of ESXi? Hardware compatability is much less of a concern that way, and becoming acquainted with Hyper-V will put you in good position to pass exam 70-652.

Good point! may consider that.

I was going for ESXi as it is used more, also I'm not going for the 70-652. 70-649 is the only one of the '08 lot that i will be doing, (apart from perhaps 70-680 or 70-260). Personally i would rather get the practice in and be a VCP in the future than do the 652.

Additionally, won't my Dream-spark subscription expire? ESXi is free!

I was more worried about the hardware.

 

[Roland0]

We picked up a HP ML110 (dual core Xeon), slapped 8gb RAM into it along with ESXi 4 and it's currently running 10 VMs without even breaking a sweat, i think total cost was around £350

hmm, that has certainly made me reconsider the hardware needs of the box. What speed is the CPU, most of the ML110's at sub £400 are 1.8GHz, i know that ESXi is going to be more fussy about memory. Any RAID or SAS card?

What O/S's are you running, less than 800 MB can't be all that great with a 1.8/2GHz CPU split 5 ways!?

 

[Roland0]

Yeah i too was a bit skeptical of that, 10 VMs? Including server VMs, i reckon its possible to be running about 10 copy's of XP there, 800mb of ram would be fine the CPU may be a bit slow, but the HDD would be going mental!

Hence me wanting something with 12GB of mem and possibly an SSD and a RAID config!