Vmware esxi 5 setup

[ChadLB]

OK so I have the following components:

MB: Ga-ma785gmt-ud2h on-board five SATA II ports support RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD
Memory: 8GB       16gb max
CPU: Amd Phenom IIx6 1090T

I have esxi 5.1 installed/running. This is a at home test rig. I have (4) 1tb drives available.

My question is in regards to datastore -
1) Can I add drives directly to this machine and run it that way? If so  what is the best way to set the drives up as. Single sata  drives/raid/etc

2) On this current machine about how many vm's could I run on it? If I  add more memory will that increase how many vm's I can add?

Thanks

Chad

[sparrowangelste]

esxi supports only hardware raid not software,

with 16 gb ram you could run 8vms to 16 vms depending on the load.

memory is sually the bottleneck not cpu

[jgkurz]

Hi ChadLB,

I'm building an ESXi server with your exact specs. How is yours running?

Does DirectPath I/O show as supported?

[ChadLB]

Yes mine says the same. It has been running fine so far. I only have 5 VMs running as of right now.