What do I need for 2 to 4 VMs/guests?

[lasinl]

I'm watching the ESX/ESXi 4 and 3.5 white box lists and I'd figure I should build one myself (I'm currently running a server or 2 with VirtualBox on my Vista box and it's taking it's toll). If I want to build a ESXi machine hosting maybe 2 to 4 VMs (Linux mainly) with at most 2 GBs each what kind of hardware should I be looking at in terms of RAM, CPU and SATA RAID card?

TIA

[krowczynski]

It all depends on what you are want to do in your enviroment.

Dó you want to use local or shared storage?

If you want to test something I would install two ESXi server managed by an vcenter.

[lasinl]

what's the difference between local and shared storage?

why do I need two ESXi servers? wouldn't that mean I need two machines/boxes?

[krowczynski]

Local Storage are the disks that are on the server where you are installed your ESXi.

You need shared storage if you want to present an Datastore (LUN, NFS-Share) to different hosts.

You do not need to machines, but if you run this in an production enviroment, waht d will you do, if the host where are all of your vms are on went down and you are not able continuing working?

[lasinl]

this is not a production environment... well it sorta is but not very important at the moment.

so does the local storage thing have anything to do with installing ESX on the same RAID drive as guest/VM stuff vs. installing ESXon some other drive (like a flash or ATA drive)?

[krowczynski]

Just install the ESXI on the local storage if it is only a test.

After full installation you will be able to install your vms on the local datastore.

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi,

I have installed ESXi 4.0 in a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with 2xQuad core processor, 8 GB RAM and 5x300GB hard drive in RAID5. The system works perfectly fine and I have at any given time 8 VM powered on ranging from 256MB RAM to 2GB RAM allocated per VM. The Dell PowerEdge 2950 is a nice server or you could even go with a Dell PowerEdge 1950 which is less costlier.

Hope this will give you some idea on choosing your hardware for ESXi 4.0

Nikhil

[tmecimore]

If it is only a a sandbox \ test type environment then a single ESXi box would be ok. You won't get any of the "enterprise features" like HA, FT, vMotion, etc. but that wouldnt be critical. A dual CPU box with multi core procs, 16G of RAM or so would be great. Disk storage is a factor of space and performance. The lenovo and Dell small business offerings have pretty much laid out some base systems that would be ideal or this. The Lenovo Think Server TS1000 line would be a good start.