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:
Nice job - what sort of SATA controller does ESXi report the system as having?
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.
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.
You can also boot the esx server from usb and use NFS,
Plus then you can use HA and DRS, maybe even DPM.
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+.
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.