Building a Test ESXi Box

[peter79]

Guys,

I'm putting together a home ESXi 5 test box.  My plan is to build a tower/mini tower with 8 GB of RAM ( might push it out to 16 or 32) and a 1TB SATA disk.  I will only have a signle socket motherboard.  I'm looking at a dual core i5 or a pricier quad core i7.

Considering this will only be used to host a few VM's (possilbly only 1 or 2 to start) and will purely be used in a home lab, I'm wondering will a dual core CPU be enough?  

[MartinAmaro]

yes that should be fine, but just google and you will find a lot great ideas for ESX home labs

http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-home-lab-why-what-and-how-considerations-when-building-your-ow...

or

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1878665

[peetz]

Two cores is the minimum supported with ESXi. It would work, but - not surprisingly - the more cores you have the better the system will perform.

Even for a home lab system I would start with four cores. The price gap from dual to quad core shouldn't matter.

- Andreas

[iw123]

Just to add to that, the AMD x6 Phenom also works pretty well for running VMs,

[slaclair]

It will be fine, especially with just 1-2 VM's.  You should see all of the crap I have running on my i5 MacBook Pro.