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DSeaman
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One NIC OK for home test environment?

I wanted to installed ESX 4.0 on my home computer, just for learning purposes. It's an Asus P6T with i7 920 and 12GB of RAM. Unfortunately the on-board Marvell NICs aren't supported by ESX. So I want to buy a CHEAP NIC which is oficially supported so I can play around with ESX. Will ESX install with a single NIC? I know it's not best practices, but this is a test environment with no vmotion, etc. Or does ESX physically require more NICs to even install?

The Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter is dirt cheap and on the ESX 4.0 HCL, but has a single port. Oh, and I can't run ESX inside Workstation because I need to test 64-bit guest VMs, which you can't do inside of Workstation 6.5.2.

Thoughts?

Derek Seaman
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jayctd
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Yeah as you say not a "best practice" but you should be fine for a test environment.

I would get another NIC if you were doing ISCSI or NFS though for the storage at home though ... but even that you CAN do all with one NIC






Jered Rassier

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*Dell Enterprise Foundations v.2 Certified professional

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jayctd
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Yeah as you say not a "best practice" but you should be fine for a test environment.

I would get another NIC if you were doing ISCSI or NFS though for the storage at home though ... but even that you CAN do all with one NIC






Jered Rassier

*EqualLogic Technical certified professional

*Dell Enterprise Foundations v.2 Certified professional

##If you have found my post has answered your question or helpful please mark it as such##

##If you have found my post has answered your question or helpful please mark it as such##
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DSeaman
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Excellent, thanks!

Derek Seaman
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Josh26
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If you can get yourself a switch that will do VLANs, you can emulate as many nics are you want. For a lab environment, I would suggest you gain more from setting up five vlans, than having two physical nics and setting up only two networks.

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DSeaman
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Good point! Any suggestions on a CHEAP VLAN enabled switch/router for home use? Cheap is the operative word.

Derek Seaman
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