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Ken73
Contributor
Contributor

Building a home-office ESXi server for testing.. Help?

I'm looking to build a fairly hefty system mostly for testing; I am a consultant for a big company and need something I can run several VM"s on. I currently have VM Workstation but it really bogs my laptop down if I try to do any labs. This is not any kind of production environment so it's not really mission critical.

Here's what I'm thinking:

ASUS KFN32-D SLI Dual 1207(F) NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 + 3050 SSI EEB Server Motherboard

with two of these processors

AMD Opteron 1220 Santa Ana 2.8GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 103W Dual-Core Server Processor[/url]

Loaded up with 16gb of server memory:

Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Server Memory Model CT2KIT25672AF667

With an SSD (or two?) for the boot drive (32gb? 64gb?) and maybe a couple of regular HDD's (500+gb) for guest OS's to have a 😧 drive on.

Is this too far off base? Keeping in mind that this is NOT a production server, it's merely a "lab" for me to run certain apps and OS's on. Some W2K3, some Linux. If it crashes, no big deal, really.

I'm a n00b to ESXi, but not to VMWare itself. Any input/help is definitely appreciated!

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KellyOlivier
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Ken,

I think a lot of people overkill for lab systems. Check the esxi forum for a whitebox thread I just did. My cluster has 16GB RAM and 2 quadcore processors and was built for less than a grand. I like having two systems so you can test out all the cool stuff as well as SRM and other toys.

Don't bother with SSD drives for a lab box imho. You can boot from thumb drive and use all storage you have for vmfs. Using local storage for esxi is a waste, but its small so no big deal. Remember when building a whitebox the most important thing is compatibility so you will most likely not be able to use the onboard nics and storage. Also if your mobo doesn't have onboard video you will need that as well. Your board looks good though and I believe those nics are supported.

Just some thoughts. Have fun.

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Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Those CPUs are not matching the board.

Have a look into the website of Asus.

Be sure to buy a configuration that is listed on the HCL or at least at some Whitebox lists, like Dave's one.

I bought a Asus KF4-D16 and two quadcore Opterons (235x). I was running in some problems due to incompatibility of the CPU and ESXi. After a call to Asus, they found a Beta (it's now released) BIOS and now everything is running fine.

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