ESXi 5 whitebox build

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kohl

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 5, 2004
Messages
290
Hoping to get some hardware advise. I am planning on building 2 whiteboxes for a ESXi 5 home lab cluster. Some of my current guidelines are as follows:
-small physical footprint
-low noise
-low power consumption
-RAM expandability
-integrated video
-price !!

My main sticking point now is AMD vs. Intel platform. Pricing out some basic hardware on Newegg, it looks like I can pick up a 6 core thuban based system for a lot cheaper than something comperable from Intel. The only downside is that I was hoping to go above 16GB total memory but all things considered, as much as I would like the 24GB I can toss into an X58 based board, I doubt I will really need that much.

Any thoughts on AMD vs. Intel in this regard? Are there any features/capabilities that put one more in favor over the other? Thanks in advance!
 
Thanks for the info; great blog you have there :)

Looks like you went with Intel hardware. I would really really love to go with an i5 or i7 build but its looking like that would be a budget buster, for building 2 boxes anyhow :(

I am leaning towards going with AMD for more physical cores, and since none of the VMs I am running will require a lot of horsepower (DCs,etc) I am not concerned if AMD's cores don't match up to Intel's on a core for core basis. However, I think with both companies releasing new CPUs soon I will wait and see what happens to pricing.
 
Realize as Jason(NetJunkie) has said many times you can do a lot with just 16GB of RAM. Even just 6 cores should get you a decent number of servers to each box.
 
@kohl

Do you plan on using vt-d/iommu? I recently built three AMD esxi5 whiteboxes. (two without iommu support and 1 with).

none iommu build:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
MOBO : GIGABYTE GA-880GMA-USB3
RAM : Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333x2 (or you can go with some gskill memory)

iommu build:
cpu and ram same as above except for motherboard.
ASUS M4A89TD PRO/USB3
Only thing about this board is that it does not have integrated video. I just bought a cheap ragexl pci card and that fixed the problem. It's a trade off for iommu as I couldn't find an amd board that supports iommu with onboard video.
 
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Outstanding; thanks a million for the post! I am very anxious to hear your experiences with the Asus board. The lack of integrated video isn't a huge deal; I can do what you did and get something cheap to do the trick.
 
kohl said:
Outstanding; thanks a million for the post! I am very anxious to hear your experiences with the Asus board. The lack of integrated video isn't a huge deal; I can do what you did and get something cheap to do the trick.
Click to expand...

I've the ASUS built for a week or two now. Running pretty smooth :D. I've re-purposed the other two esxi servers because one server with 16gb of ram was more than enough for my needs.

I'll post screenshots later today.
 
Fortunately, ESXi 5 supports more NICs than 4 did. I bought a Dell XPS 8300 with an i5-2300 processor and it worked out of the box. Only issue was that the i5-2300 didn't support Vt-d. The i5-2400 does, I believe (double check of course). You can put 16 GB of RAM in it for about $100 USD.
 
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