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tommytraddles
Contributor
Contributor

Build Critique required for AMD Phenom II based ESXi 5 whitebox

I am building an ESXi home server on AMD to save me a whole ton of money. Although AMD is not officially supported, from my own research, this build should work, and with 6 cores I thought this would be more appropriate for VMWare than the equivalent 4 core processor that I could get from Intel at this price. I was wondering if I can get some critiques of my build for the money I am spending (£393.59), as I would hear some informed opinions. Prices are in pounds as I am in the UK. Please note this is mostly a whitebox / test system that I will run at home, not a corporate server, and I will not require RAID. This mobo does not come with integrated graphics, hence the budget PCI-E card included, and I have an old 1TB Seagate sata disk (7200) that I was thinking of recycling too instead of buying a new one. Thanks

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2HGz AM3 Black Edition Processor                                                                           £134.98
Gigabyte 970A-D3 Motherboard Socket AM3 AMD970 SB950 DDR3 SATA RAID ATX Gigabit Ethernet LAN              £71.38
16GB Corsair Vengeance 8GB Memory Kit (2x4GB) PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 DIMM (£32.90 x2 )                        £65.80
Cooler Master RC-430-KWN1 Elite 430 Midi Tower with Window - Black                                                                 £39.47
ATI Radeon HD 5450 SILENT 512MB GDDR3                                                                                                       £22.99
Corsair CMPSU-500CXV2UK Builder Series CX500V2 - 80 Plus Certified Power Supply                                           £44.98
LiteOn IHAS122-18 22x Internal SATA DVD-RW BLK OEM                                                                                    £13.99

Total                                 £393.59                                                                                                                            

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5 Replies
MartinT80
Contributor
Contributor

What are you planning on using the home server for?  If it's just training or it's not processor intensive, you can't beat HP microservers for value.

£199+VAT with £100 Cashback so about £140 plus the cost of 8GB RAM

It's only got a slow dual core CPU though. I've got one and it's good for 5-6 VM's that are not heavily used.

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/658553-421

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tommytraddles
Contributor
Contributor

Sorry, should have been more specific. The ESXi server is not to practise ESXi particularly but Exchange 2010. A couple of other servers and a workstation will exist too. I already have an HP Microserver as a backup box, but there is no way it could cope with the load that I have in mind. Thanks.

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scottyyyc
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The biggest factor in whitebox systems is trying to make sure as many components as possible (i.e. chipset, NICs) are on VMware's HCL. If they're not on the HCL, you might run into wierd, one-off issues, and support options will be bleak.

Otherwise the system should be fine.

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muelb
Contributor
Contributor

Did you already built your whitebox with these components? Is it fully functional with ESXi 5?

I want to build also a system like this and need some informations about hardware thats well operating with ESXi.

Thanks a lot!

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1grove
Contributor
Contributor

I have a whitebox based on a gigabyte GA880 that I have been using successfully though esxi 4.1 but now am experiencing an issue with my intel desktop nics dropping during connection to both iscsi and nfs sans while installing windows server from an iso residing on same datastore. Not sure if this is a bug with the early release of esxi5 and if I should persist with my current build. NICS are recognized will drop and create an event. My SAN is based on nexentastor running on an supermicro atom motherboard. This is a home lab so not much at stake except being side tracked while studying for my vcp update.

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