Specs for a VMWare server.....

This is just for my home network, not an enterprise setup.

CPU

Phenom X3 8450 - £72.21

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AMD-P...l-Cache-Retail

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-DS2H - £72.38

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...A300-Micro-ATX

Memory

TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX - 4GB - £55.94

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-(...S-4-4-4-12-DHX

(The website doesn't say if these work with this board)

HardDisk(s)

2 x 320 GB Maxtor STM3320820AS - £33.71 (£67.42)

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/320-G...MB-Cache-11-ms

PSU

480W Tagan 2Force (Already own)

Case

Lian Li PC-V350B (Already Own)

I have left enough space to add another 4GB of RAM

Total = £267.95

Or

See if this comes back into stock and add the RAM and disks to that?

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpr...%3D%26SB%3Dplh

i'd be tempted to get the hp as you get the decent quad opty which my be better for the server style tasks when your running vmware. though the gigabyte board does support upto 16gb of ram which may be useful to prolong the life of the server. hmm i really don't know though the hp may be worth it for the opteron alone

The only issue I am thinking is will the HP server take standard DDR2 RAM?

you wanting to run ESXi on this ?

check it all on the HCL

http://www.vmware.com/resources/comp...ient=firefox-a

the ESX HCL is pretty strict.

why not be really clever and run a separate storage LAN , with iSCI or NFS form your freenas box.
then you can get a second ESX box and cluster it :)

hmmm good point about the hardware. I have had ESXi running on a Q6600 and an ASUS P5W-DH board but I think that ran due to the intel RAID controller. RAM for my old Dell is stupid money and running 2 x P4 Xenon CPUs is costly, hence the needed upgrade but that server has a PERC RAID controller and 3 x 36GB HDDs in RAID5.

I'll have to go and checkout the compatibility list and see what I can do.

there are some good blogs on building a ghetto spec esx box - I'll see if I can dig them up for you

what would I do without Hexus and Moby? :)

Is it not just the RAID controller that ESXi is picky about?

mostly it is the storage that it seems to get picky about - abstracting it with NFS or iSCSI works well.

i think it's just the raid controller that it will spit feathers about

I'll have a go with NFS with my current setup if not I'll get reading those blogs.

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/32...white-box.html