Good enough for ESXi???

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paulwatson5

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Feb 8, 2014
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Hi

I'm looking to build a cheap as possible ESXi box and wondering if my spare parts would do the job.

Now I know I would need a memory upgrade but is the rest ok?

Intel Xeon E5420 2.5Ghz Quad Core (Socket 771 but modded to fit 775)
ASUS P5KPL-AM-SE Micro ATX Socket 775 motherboard.
2GB (2 x 1GB DDR2 memory) Board has 2 memory banks with a 4GB Max (may take more with newer BIOS???)
250GB SATA Drive for ESXi
Onboard Gigabit NIC.

This is going to be my first ESXi box, never used it before and just want to use it for testing and learning before properly setting up an ESXi box for firewall and FreeNAS/web hosting box.

Any advice will be much appreciated.
 
RAM will be your most immediate issue.

Minimum requirements:
ESXi 5.1 = 2GB
ESXi 5.5 = 4GB

That is just to install the hypervisor.
 
So if I installed 4GB I wouldn't be able to run and VM's on there?

Would installing a previous version of ESXi do any good?
 
4G will give you about 2G free after install to use for VMs, after overhead. That's usable, but not a lot. In theory what you have should work, if the motherboards supports exposing the VT flag on that cpu.
 
Yeah, you need at least 2-4x your ram to get anything actually running.
 
You'd be better off getting a 771 board and using FB-Dimms so you can get the memory density you'll need. Otherwise you'll be stuck at a max of 8GB with regular DDR2.
 
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