I bought a stripped down system from HP to confirm that it would meet my needs and my small business customers' needs (I'm an IT consultant ramping up on VMware). HP offers a 30 day MBG. I wanted to make sure it would run ESXi with no mods, it was quiet enough for a small office, it performed well with a light load, I liked the box, VI Client and Converter worked as advertised and I could figure out an acceptable backup/restore solution. I fully understood that this configuration would only support 1 or 2 small VM's in a test environment.

Part # 470064-836 = HP Proliant ML350 G5 LFF Tower, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5410 (2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 80W), Smart Array E200i/128MB Controller (RAID 0/1/5), dual HP 1000-W Hot-Plug Power Supplies, HP 2GB Fully Buffered DIMM PC2-5300 2X1GB Memory, Embedded NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Network Adapter and CD/DVD.

Part# 458926-B21 = HP 250GB 3G SATA 7.2K Hot Plug SATA MDL Hard Drive.

I wasn't disappointed. Everything worked well, including VI Client and converting physical machines and VM server vm's. I then intentionally overloaded it to see how it would handle it. I've ordered 4 gb of additional memory and another 250 gb SATA hard drive that I will use to mirror the first. So far, I've run W2K3 domain controllers and Visual Studio development environments (VS 2005, VS2008, SQL 2005, asp.net). I'm going to convert an Exchange box after I install the additional memory. Then on to CentOS 5.2.

I must stress this is for a two user home office test environment and I only need to run a few small VM's that will fit in 250 gb and consume less than 6 gb of memory. But I'm still wondering if I should have purchased SAS drives. I started a thread on that question.

The ML350 gives me the option of purchasing VI3 with full support. The only down side of this box is that ESXi is not supported.

(Please excuse all the white space. What I see in my browser (Firefox or IE) when I'm editing doesn't jive with what I see after I post the message.)