Micro ESXi server and the new Intel S1200KP motherboard.

[RimBlock]

Well it finally arrive on the shores of Singapore and in to my fair hands....

The S1200KP mITX Intel server motherboard compatible with Pentium dual cores, i3-21XX and E3-12XX Xeon processors.

Someone commissioned me to build the smallest ESXi server I possibly could as they has an ESXi appliance they wanted to use but it needed minimal resources and they wanted the minimal of rack space to be used.

Here is the result .

The goods (The case, an i3-2100, the S1200KP motherboard, 4GB 1333MHz ram and a Seagate 2.5" 250GB hard drive).

The case (Antec ISK100-90)

The inside, first fitting of the motherboard to try to work out wiring routing.

Hard drive fitted. Two 2.5" drives will fit if needed. The red strips are to prevent the hard drive grounding on the case.

Cables added including the PicoPSU ATX connector and SATA power.

The board fitted and wiring tidied up (notice Silverstone low profile fan).

Job done .

After a bit of fun and games with getting the hdd to boot rather than the network, a quick connection from vSphere and we get...

Lovely jubbly.

RB

 

[RimBlock]

How much are the HDDs over there?

They have gone up very fast like I understand they have in the UK.

A 2TB drive here is around 110 GBP but you also need to realise our VAT equiv. here is 7%. A 2.5" 500GB drive is around 65 GBP.

Retailers over here have not really grasped the whole 'on-line selling' vibe and so sell with printed flyers (price lists) that are circulated around and updated regularly. Some places publish a PDF version on-line but it is not so unusual for them to be slightly inaccurate on pricing especially of fast moving items with volatile pricing (ram/cpus/hdd).

RB

 

[RimBlock]

Nice little unit that mate, how many VM's you going to run on it? I want to build a small HTPC using one of these cases, they look nice to work with

The client was only looking to run a single low resource VM appliance but the appliance could not be split from the ESXi VM (supplied as part of a product). The client therefore wanted the smallest ESXi server he could find to save rack space at low cost.

Considering there are now 8GB DDR3 sticks coming to market now (Geil do a set of 2x8GB here) you could put in a E3-1230 processor and have a 4 core 8 threaded 16GB server running with two 2.5" enterprise SATA drives all in a box around 1ftx1ftx3". The only concern would be the heatsink and fan but in a data centre it should be fine if there is proper cooling.

The case is pretty good for a HTPC if you do not need an optical drive or are ok with an external one. The only things I can think of the case is not so good for is a gaming PC as you cannot add any extra PCIe cards or a unit that requires 3.5" hard drives (e.g. maybe a NAS). In the 5th picture you can see where the mb goes and there are holes around the top level which can be used for cable ties to secure all the cabling to make it nice and neat. Makes life easier.

RB