I would like to add the following parts to workinglist, as it runs very fast to:

Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R (cheap motherboard with build in graphics so ni need for any extra card)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (run at 1.01 Volt but with full speed)
8 Gbyte of Kingston 4x2 GB modules DDR667
LSI logic 8344ELP (8 port SAS)
1 x 150 GB (10k raptor)
2 x 750 Gbyte (7k wd)
1 x Intel Dual Pro 1000MT Server

The above runs very cool and is fast enough for 12-15 servers. power consumption is around 95 watts with CPU loaded.
The onboard Realtek does not work with ESX but I build this for use with VMware Server. Now when ESX 3i is so cheap I will buy that one and run. I have it running on it now and its absolutely stable and runs with good speed. I know I could buy a sevrer for the price of the above stuff, but a sevrer would cost me more electricity, run hotter and make alot more noise without beeing so much faster.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/116689

Would you mind adding the Dell Precision 670 workstation to the list?

Over the weekend I managed to install and run ESX 3.5 with only a minor config change, the change is simple and just requires the CPUID check to be disabled to stop the '0xbad001e' (Unsupported CPU) error on boot. To do this, simply boot into the recovery console, edit the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file and add /vmkernel/checkCPUIDLimit = "FALSE". Reboot, and ESX will boot and function fine. My setup is utilising the 670s onboard (ICH5) SATA controller. The Intel 10/100/1000 onboard network adaptor work fine.

The box spec is as follows:

Precision 670
Dual 3GHz Xeon Processors
8Gb ECC DDR2 400MHz
Intel Pro 100/1000 On board Network Adaptor
1x 40Gb SATA2 HD
1x 500Gb SATA2 HD

I hope this helps,

Thanks,

Martyn

I recently built out a 4 host test environment using:

Acer Aspire MT500A Desktop which I picked up for $400.00 on clearance at best buy. The onboard SATA and NIC's didn't work so I order 2 Intel Pro/1000 GT Nics for each host for $29.99 per nic and used a IDE Drive as my boot drive. I have exernal NFS and iSCSI setup for vmfs/vmdk storage. The machines came with 2GB RAM but support up to 8GB so I orderd 4 2GB Sticks per server to mac them out at a price of around $150.00 per server;. So all in all each host ended up costing $580.00.

I have a server that is setup running Centos w/ virtual server that I am using for a storage server. On it I am running multiple storage solutions as vm's. So I was able to remove the 500GB SATA drives that came in the Acer machines and put them into my virtual server machine and was able to gain 2TB of storage in the process. Also reused the 1GB RAM sticks in my storage box, well not all but half of them. End result for just over 2K I have

4 Hosts ESX 3.5 Environent utilizing NFS & iSCSI for storage with over 2TB of storage and multiple storage servers allowing me to test different solutions.

17Ghz Processing Power with 8 Cores

32Gb Ram

Not a bad test environment.......

We will be starting our first rollout of VMWare in a week or two. We're using 4 top-end DELL 2950's for the physical hosts and an EMC NS20 for the storage.

I would LOVE to start building a TEST environment right now and I have 3 systems exactly like the cheap AMD system posted earlier as well as plenty of storage options.

However, what I DON'T have are test versions of ESX. How are y'all doing this? Are you just using your production license on test systems?

My network admin told me that you could only use one "evaluation ESX" evaluation and there's not such for VC.

Is he just misinformed and the "evaluation period" is like with Windows products (i.e. install it to test and just wipe it when done, no activation necessary).

If that's so, I guess you have to have the "real" product first because you don't seem to be able to get more than one trial license via the website.

Not being dense on purpose, just not getting how you can test the whole enchilada.