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Rob999
Contributor
Contributor

Yet another ESXi whitebox system $850 (new) - 1TB Hardware RAID

FWIW

Built a new whitebox ESXi system yesterday.

$850, all new hardware, dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, 1TB RAID 1, power effecient

  • ASUS P5QL PRO motherboard (1 LGA775 socket, Intel P43 chipset, 4 DIMM RAM, 1 - 16x PCIe, 3 - PCI, 2 - 1 x PCIe, up to 16GB DDR2 RAM, up to 1600MHz FSB) $84.50

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.66G (1066Mhz FSB) w/retail box fan $119

  • Kingston 4GB KIT KHX8500D2K2/4G RAM $60

  • Enermax EPR425AWT pro82+ 425w ATX power supply $90

  • Cooler Master RC-335-KKN1-GP tower case $45

  • Adaptec 2405 RAID controller (8x PCIe, w/4 head SATA cable) $227

  • Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI Ethernet adapter PWLA8391GT $30

  • 2 x WD 1TB WD10EACS SATA2 7200rpm "Green" SATA HDDs $199 (for both)

I added a couple parts I already had: CD-ROM (basic IDE), a cheap PCI video card and an Adaptec AHA24x0 SCSI card (not yet in box).

This is running RAID1 in hardware so no fooling around with trying to get drivers in to ESXi, etc. You could do this for a lot less if you bought a cheaper RAM, power supply and no hardware RAID.

Works great!

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bartsmit
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Rob,

I'm setting up an ESXi with the same mobo and cpu. This works great but when I try and set up a Windows 2003 64-bit guest I get a message that this requires 64-bit hardware.

From what I'm reading, the E7300 Core 2 Duo has Intel VT and 64-bit capability.

Did you manage to get 64-bit guests to run?

Thanks,

Bart...

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. You typically have to enable VT in the BIOS of the host and do a cold restart.

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Rob999
Contributor
Contributor

Dave hit the nail on the head. I've never seen VT functionality turned on by default in a BIOS. I've had to turn it on even in server class hardware.

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JRP_C___Java
Contributor
Contributor

Rob999,

Thanks for sharing your ESXi white box system specs!

I would be really interested to know what sort of performance you get out of that system?

I wish to build a white box system similar to yours simply for testing and development. When I ask about the systems performance under ESXi I am interested in general terms can the system handle say 5 VM's running at the same time. Whats the maximum number you have had running? I know that is quite an open ended question as it is very dependent on what the VM's are doing, (i.e. hosting databases, email servers etc), but assume the system is just for testing and so a maximum of 1 or 2 users will be using the VMs at any one time.

Thank you in advance.

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Rob999
Contributor
Contributor

Hi - thanks!

It really does depend on what resources your VMs will need. Generally speaking, most ESX/ESXi hosts run out of memory before they run out of CPU but again, it completely depends on what your VMs need. You could easily run 8-10 VMs (or more) if the CPU requirements for each VM were low and you have enough memory. However, if you have a machine that needs 4GHz of CPU to run well, it'll take the whole box and the other VMs would probably be completely unusable. So, 5 VMs is certainly possible if they each only need < 1GHz of CPU and you make sure you have enough RAM.

I'm surrently running 4 VMs on this box and it's typically using about 600-800 MHz of CPU and about 2.5 GB of RAM. The VMs I have are:

  1. Win 2k file/print/web server: Win 2k sp4, SQL 2000, ColdFusion 4.5

  2. Win XP Home: Streaming music server (Windows Media Connect)

  3. WIn XP Home: Desktop PC that was P2V'd - just a basic desktop install

  4. WIn XP Pro: Desktop PC that was P2V'd - basic desktop install

Hope that helps...

Rob

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chrisinparis
Contributor
Contributor

Hello

Silly question (I've looked but cannot find a good enough answer), but is the number of VMs I can install limited to the number of cores? Yesterday (can no longer find my source, bad sign!) I'm sure I read that if I had a quad processor (so four cores), I was limited to using 4 VMs.

Could anyone clear this up for me please?

Currently we have ESXi 4.0 (free version activated using serial) on a HP ML150 (Xeon E5405 quad core, 16 GB of RAM). We have installed Windows SBS 2008 on it, but might change this is we are not limited to a max of 4 VMs as I thought.

Thanks

Chris

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

With 4 cores, you are limited 4 virtual CPU's, not vm's. Your vCPU is 20 vCPUs per core, or 192 max. Your vm limit is about 170. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf

-KjB

VMware vExpert

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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chrisinparis
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks a lot for the answer, and for the link.

I'm very new to ESXi (but been a Fusion user for 18 months now) as you can probably tell!

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astronix
Contributor
Contributor

i have same configuration

cpu 7300

mb asus pql pro

4 gig ram

windows 7

i can't run esxi on vmware workstation 7

plz help

thank

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