So about a month ago after reading several whitebox pages, I decided to spring for it and build a cluster of my own. I wanted to post my setup so others have a proven solution that is pretty cheap for a 8 core 16GB RAM cluster.
4 Hitachi drives for Openfiler - 400 bucks
2 Intel PWLA8391GT nics - 54 bucks
2 ASUS M2-M3N8200 barbones kits - 290 bucks
4 sets of OCZ DDR2-8500 RAM - 240 bucks
2 Promise TX4 conrollers - 120 bucks
2 AMD Phenom X4 2.8 Ghz processors - 390 bucks
2 Kingston USB drives - 10 bucks.
It comes out to 550 bucks per node excluding storage. The storage was for an external Openfiler box so I can have raid. I am very pleased with this setup, but wish I had more pci slots for added nics to setup link aggregation even though it wouldn't affect performance for this setup since it will be the same ip being accessed. I also bought a 300 dollar switch that does link agg and jumbos.
*Sorry, I think I marked this as a question....*
Message was edited by: KellyOlivier
Hi Kelly -
I am in the processes of spec'ing out an ESXi whitebox. How is your configuration holding up? Would you change any of the components if you were to start over? Thanks for posting!
I may have specced out a whitebox with more pci slots for more nics. I like to setup link aggr and test things like that but if you don't need that stuff no worries.