Advice needed for a vmware lab setup

[strike-down]

Hi Chaps

Looking to start playing with vmware, and after a couple of systems to experiment with. Looking for something that draws a relatively low amount of power, but able to run a couple of OS's at once (server 2008 r2, 2012 etc). Ignoring budget, what sort of specs would you guys recommend? From the reading around I've done, something based around the i3 CPU's would fit the bill, but treat me as a complete newbie to virtualisation

Thanks in advance!

[DanceswithUnix]

For just playing I think just get the best setup you can afford for the budget.

Intel turn off some of the vm acceleration features of their CPUs, but I doubt you could tell in everyday use. Enough RAM is probably the most important part.

If budget is tight, then one of the HP microservers that are always available on cashback or similar deal seem popular, otherwise one of the new AM1 systems would give 4 very cheap cores to play with.

My home server is a socket FM1 board. 8GB of ram and Quad core 3GHz, but very low idle power. That runs virtual machines using the kvm system built into Centos rather than VMware, currently with 3 VMs running, but gives an indication. One of the VMs is a public facing Minecraft server run by my son, so it gets real use

[wasabi]

i3 and lots of RAM. Motherboard - you could check compatability matrix in vmware's website, but often desktop type kit isn't listed so check forums for esxi support.

[Splash]

Do you need local storage, or do you have shared? If you have a NAS that serves iSCSI or NFS then you could do a lot worse than a couple of Intel NUCs (though you'd need to build a custom ISO it's easy enough).

As there seems to be an upsurge in interest in this kind of thing I might put together a "home lab" thread with the details of what I'm using.

[walibe]

It depends on what your doing. I've struggled with single CPU Xenon servers in the past running just a few Windows and Linux servers. I've been playing with Thin Clients and ESXi/hypervisor etc with multiple CPUs/tons of RAM and as above, lots of RAM is the most important bit. I would find an i7 (can any i5s hyperthread?) based CPU if you can stretch to it. Don't know enough about the modern AMD CPUs to comment sorry.

[strike-down]

I've got a server that I can set up to provide iscsi, so if the NUCs are powerful enough, that could well be a viable option! Have to work out how to set iscsi up as well, but hey, it's something I should probably know anyway :-)
I have read that there are a few driver issues with the NUCs and server OS's though?

And a thread like that would be incredibly useful to someone like myself!

[shaithis]

A NUC should be powerful enough as long as you don't want to run anything too demanding. The problem with them is the same issue that I am facing everything I look at moving my ESX system to Kabinis.....lack of RAM slots.