ESXi whitebox test lab

[Elvo]

Hi everyone.

I'm planning a new whitebox lab with ESXi 5.0

I was planning on basing this round the Intel CPU Core i7 3770T for low power and VT-d.

Then to match it to a board I was thinking something like the ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M. I'm looking to install 32GB of RAM and Ideally looking for two onboard nics that work natively with ESXi.

Anybody have much experience with this? Seems to be the one grey area is getting a board that will do everything you want natively without too much hassle.

Any recommendations or comments are greatly received.

[shaithis]

Sounds good. Almost all of the newer Intel and Realtek NICs are supported in 5.0 and above, which is the only real consideration when building a cheap ESX box.....a quick search of that board shows Broadcom NIC.....again probably supported but you really do need to get exact chip model and check against the HCL.

I am a firm believer that AMD give considerably better value for money in this area though and if you go with ESX 5.5 instead, you can enable a lot more power management features......if I was building fresh again now I would go with something like the Asrock 970 Extreme3 or even a gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P and an FX6300 or FX8300.....much better bang for buck, you can even add a cheap Realtek or Intel NIC (or 2) in to add additional LAN ports.

[herulach]

If you want intel, then you might want to seriously consider this for £560 inc VAT.
http://www.serversplus.com/servers/s...del-32gb4esxi5

The performance probably won't be quite up to snuff with an i7, but considering the CPU & ram are in the region of £450 it doesn't look like a bad deal.

That being said, I agree with Shiathis, unless the type of stuff you're running absolutely needs the straightline speed of an i7/xeon then I'd build around a 8***

[Butuz]

The only reason for not going AMD on this project is if your running it 24/7? The AMD will chew through a fair bit more electrickery, the i7's are SOOO much more efficient particularly at idle.

Butuz

[Elvo]

Thanks very much for your replies. If i can figure out where the thanks button is at some point I will add that too!

AMD is tempting, will do some more reading. The main attraction is the 45W power rating of the 3770T. The FX8300 is 95W. I will have to read more to understand how the power management features would impact power consumption over time but I'm really looking for something that i can leave on all the time, use as a NAS, Physicalize (if you have heard that term?) 1 or 2 workstations and run a test bed for vm's running various roles. Perhaps I should just keep it simple and aim for a box that I will only have on when I'm studying.

Thanks though for the guidance and opinion. Will keep reading.

[philipmathews]

I have tried it with an fx8320 then started using the hp micro server because of the amount of electricity it uses although micro server to slow now looking to build a Xeon e3 with 32gb ecc