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mparent
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 3.5 on a budget

I really wanted to get an esx host running, I don't have the money (being a poor student) to buy a fancy server so I pieced together some spare parts and I now have ESXi 3.5 running on an Asus A8N motherboard, an AMD X2 4400+ with 1.5GB of ram, and a WD 320GB Sata drive. I have 4 vm's running on it now, and performance is smooth so far.

It may not be an HP Proliant BL480 with 32GB ram, and SAN storage, but it is pretty sweet :smileygrin:

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Nice job - what sort of SATA controller does ESXi report the system as having?

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mparent
Contributor
Contributor

I had some issues initially, so in the bios I have serial ata set to raid. ESXi is showing it as a CK804 Serial ATA Controller. However, it may work without setting it to raid, I found out my issue was a bad CD.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

so in the bios I have serial ata set to raid

From what I've seen so far, none of the SATA drivers that ship with ESXi support RAID if there's a software component required for RAID to work.

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Smeagol
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You can also boot the esx server from usb and use NFS,

Plus then you can use HA and DRS, maybe even DPM.

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jamesserver
Contributor
Contributor

Very Cool!! Does ESXi recognize the NIC's and SATA drive? I too am looking to put together a really cheap virtual server. I am thinking of going with the X2 6000+.

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mparent
Contributor
Contributor

The drive and nic are both recognized fine. I now have 5 vm's installed, I plan to run two at a time. Mostly just to play with different OS's, among other things. The average cpu doesn't seem to go above 50%, when running two vm's memory usage gets to about 1.2GB (my vm's have 512MB each). When no vm's are running, memory usage is about 350MB +/- a few mb.

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