What spec to run ESXi and a few VMs

nst68

nst68

nst68

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At the moment I've got a couple of Raspberry Pi's running HomeAssistant and pi-hole.

I'm looking for something to keep me occupied and have deceided to move these to VM's on a home server, and give me a project when I can start playing with other stuff (stuff not defined atm!).

What spec machine would for this?

I've been looking at getting a 2nd hand USFF machine like a Dell OptiPlex 7040, but don't know what processor and memory spec would be needed.
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Should I be looking at a SFF
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or even an old laptop

Noise is a factor as it'll be on 24/7 in my home office with me.

Budget is around £500.

Thanks.
 
Is that a HP EliteDesk SFF, if so I have run ESXi on a couple of them, equipped with 64gb ram and core i7, they are more than up to running a few VMs for testing.

Biggest bottleneck is disk IO, once everything is booted, running and settled down its OK but when you got a few VMs accessing disk at same time you will notice it.
 
SupraWez said:
Is that a HP EliteDesk SFF, if so I have run ESXi on a couple of them, equipped with 64gb ram and core i7, they are more than up to running a few VMs for testing.

Biggest bottleneck is disk IO, once everything is booted, running and settled down its OK but when you got a few VMs accessing disk at same time you will notice it.
Click to expand...

Yep, it's a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF, I can get it with a 500GB SSD to help cut access times.

How loud was it in normal use?
If needs be I should be able to change the case and heatsink fans for something quieter, not sure about the PSU fan though.
 
I had an old OptiPlex 7010, with a 3rd gen i7 running ESXi and a few VMs. Nothing overly stressful, but it seemed to handle everything OK, at least until my roof leaked and water came through the ceiling onto it! I'm not sure about the 7040, but recasing the 7010 was a faff as it had a lot of non standard connectors and needed things plugging in from the case to avoid errors on boot.
 
It might be worth giving some thought to weather of not you might need multiple NICs at some point the future. If so then a SFF with a PCIexpress slot would probably make more sense
 
The SFF version of the Dell OptiPlex 7040 has 2 low profile pcie slots and a M.2 slot,
I picked up a
DELL PRECISION 3620 Mini-Tower E3 1270 v5 cpu 32GB DDR4 RAM 256GB SSD and a Quadro GPU (I sold the Quadro on the bay for £150 so the pc owes me only £100) and I have a basic gpu card I can use for it, The pc was in mint condition so it worked out a real bargain I like these because they also have 2 x 5.25 inch slots on the front panel
 
I've got a 5070 MFF which I find very capable and not loud providing you don't push the CPU too hard. I'd agree with the comment about considering the need for a second NIC though.
 
Depending on what you're hosting, a NUC would totally be enough - I went a bit overboard and bought a job lot of mini PCs off ebay for about £800 and I've clustered them using Proxmox. I run a whole bunch of services (Pihole, Home assistant, CCTV server, game servers, Omada controller etc.) so I don't regret getting 5 servers in a job lot. Runs at about 100W most of the time according to my UPS, which is a lot less than a big rackmount server (but more than a NAS or Pi probably) but it might be an option if you're looking to expand in the future. Good luck!
 
Totally agree. Using a NUC for this is quite common, and they're at least as good as the Dell offerings. My home setup is a bit overboard too as I recently got myself a Dell PowerEdge beast. I'm going to consolidate everything I can onto that and then use a NUC as a front-end, so the upfront cost will be somewhat offset by lower running costs (and less noise).
 
I've just bought a HP Microserver on eBay with a Intel Xeon E3-1265L v2 and 16GB

No drives in it, but the current owner has replaced all the fans with Noctua ones, so should be nice and quiet.
 
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