What spec to run ESXi and a few VMs

[nst68]

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.

Should I be looking at a SFF

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.

 

[nst68]

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.

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.

 

[nst68]

Thanks for all the advice

Now to choose!

 

[nst68]

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.