Home server for esxi

pontecraig

pontecraig

pontecraig

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Joined
31 Jan 2014
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17
Hi looking at getting a home server to do virtual labs on.
Ive a couple of n54ls but looking for a resl server. Can anyone recommend anything i was looking at the ml110 g6 cheets
 
The N54 is an excellent ESXi server that punches well above its weight. I’d definitely try out ESXi on one of them before you start splashing out unnecessary cash. The only thing you really need is a decent amount of memory - 8Gb at least.
 
ML110 G6 is extremely old now. I had a G7 and sold it 3-4 years ago! RAM, power consumption and noise are your three best friends/worst enemies. 8GB is absolute bare minimum, and there won't be a lot you will be able to do with that amount of RAM. 16GB is what I would call a decent starting point. I run ESXi on my MicroServer Gen8 with 16GB of RAM and it has 3 VMs on it: a domain controller (Win 2016 with 2GB RAM), file server (Win 2012 R2 with 8 GB RAM), UPS agent monitor thingie (Linux, 512 MB RAM), and the host itself is currently running at 78% memory utilisation.
 
I still have an ML110 G7 running ESXi with 16GB RAM - use it for testing software and then trash the VM and start again. ESXi runs on a Kingston USB memory stick plugged into the motherboard header. I agree that 8GB RAM is the bare minimum you'll want. Also consider an SSD for your VMs if you don't want to be waiting all day for them to do their stuff.
 
It all depends what you want to run on your server - I have an ancient ML110 G7 with 12GB RAM.

On that I have 5 different servers running 24/7 (AD, Pihole, RDS, Plex, OwnCloud) that run absolutely fine. No need for an SSD as they are not doing enough to warrant anything more than a plain old mechanical HDD... no point spending money on unnecessary bits when there are no bottlenecks anyway. The only time it feels slow is if I am doing something intensive on all servers, at which point it does suffer with contention. However, that is so few and far between, and it's only a home server so not the end of the world.
 
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