Help me. Cheapest ESXi 5 Host for Lab

N

NetJunkie

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 16, 2001
Messages
9,683
Working on a BoM (Bill of Materials) for our engineers for a home lab. We're hoping to help subsidize the cost for them. See if you can do better than me on the servers. I want them to have two physical hosts with 8GB each. No internal disks are needed. Minimum of 2 NICs, prefer 3. All features must be supported though VMDirectPath can be optional. These need to be pretty quiet so no loud cases/fans.

What ya got? For the rest I'm going to use a Synology two-bay NAS and either HP 1810G-10 switch or if enough of our people want it Cisco SG300 switches on NFR (just ordered my SG300-28 like that).
 
I love the Dell T110's.

I have one personally and the company provided me an additional one. Both have 16gb of ram but the T110 II supports up to 32gb. Internal USB ports and seem to be well supported on ESXi 5.
 
Do those require ECC RAM? If so they are more than building and I don't care about a warranty from Dell.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
I love the Dell T110's.

I have one personally and the company provided me an additional one. Both have 16gb of ram but the T110 II supports up to 32gb. Internal USB ports and seem to be well supported on ESXi 5.
Click to expand...

+1

I have 3 of the 1st gen T110 .. reliable and quiet machines.

They are capable of VT-d although it's neither an option in BIOS
(it's enabled by default) or spoken of in Dell's manuals for the first gen - not
sure about the Gen 2 systems since I have not purchased one.


From another recent thread:

Netwerkz101;1037806692 PowerEdge T110 II ($459 base) + Intel® Xeon® E3-1230 3.20 GHz said:
16GB Memory (4x4GB)[/URL]

~$750 for a complete server class system ready for ESXi, XenServer, or Hyper-V
You can substitute the $60 processor upgrade for the 1TB F3 Hard Drive Danny Bui listed
(server only comes with a single 250GB drive in base config)
Click to expand...


You could get away with the base system + 8GG for ~$560 each.
Dell Small Business is where I got the pricing from (not enterprise)
 
Last edited:
Actually..these might work just fine. Small Biz let's me do more customization. Wish I could do diskless. Nice thing here is that the engineer can decide what they want. Cheap CPU? More and get VMDirectPath? etc. Like it.

Thanks guys!
 
NetJunkie said:
Actually..these might work just fine. Small Biz let's me do more customization. Wish I could do diskless. Nice thing here is that the engineer can decide what they want. Cheap CPU? More and get VMDirectPath? etc. Like it.

Thanks guys!
Click to expand...

Found with dell that it seems you can never do diskless, we order R610's and still have to order a single disk.
 
$560? really? i'm seeing ~$950 on the partner direct site. of course, can't drop server 2k8 from the configuration online unfortunately. that would bring it down at least 300, maybe more.
 
Can't you get these used from Dell as well through the outlet?

Disregard..looks like they only have the older model and they are expensive...yeah..this is a great deal.
 
Last edited:
madrebel said:
you have to order the C series. C for 'custom' and you have to order 5 at a time.
Click to expand...

Interesting, thanks for the info.

NetJunkie,

On another note, hows the performance on the DS211+. I need a NAS for home and while the DS1511+ would be great its a little out of my price range.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Interesting, thanks for the info.
Click to expand...
you didnt hear it from me :).

if you have a dell rep just ask them about the C series poweredge servers. I never heard about them till I became a partner. It is a 5 server minimum order though.

Personally though I prefer having 2 x 72gb drives in raid1 for local boot. Typically that option is less expensive than Iscsi or FC HBAs. Coraid's AoE HBA's are quite reasonable but you have to order direct from coraid.

I'm not a huge fan of diskless boot for VM hosts though so color me biased.
 
"I'm not a huge fan of diskless boot for VM hosts though so color me biased."

Can you share why?
 
two main reasons, 1 minor.

1) cost

you can go with 2 x small SSDs in raid1 or 2 small laptop drives even for 200 dollars versus the $1000 it is going to cost you for a qlogic HBA. you also confine all VM host IO to the local hardware. the host layer isn't generating much IO over the wire but i still prefer to not have it leave the local hardware at all.

2) DR

god forbid, but when the SAN goes down (and you need to plan that it will at some point) i don't want my hosts going down with it. sure, i will lose the guests but the physical hosts shouldn't be down too. where if you're booting off a HBA and the disk drops off the network chances are your host is gone too forcing a reboot.

another thing that ties into DR I like to run (at least one host) AD and DNS on local disk storage. this way when the shit hits the fan i can bring up those hosts and those critical services can be brought up w/o needing the SAN.

3) little conveniences.

what if i'm planning to down the san for upgrading and what not? maybe i want vcenter to stay online so i just vmotion the disk to local storage. or maybe there are other critical services that need to stay up. as long as I have enough local VFMS space across my hosts I can keep those services online while doing maintenance and move them back once the SAN is back online. can't do that if everything relies on the SAN. there is of course the option for active/passive SAN setups or even active/active full mesh but i doubt most folks (myself included) are working in environments where that is the norm. i'm getting there but even when i have mirrored SANs i still think i want local boot simply because i'm more comfortable with it.

I won't profess that my way is the right way, just how i like to do things.
 
madrebel said:
$560? really? i'm seeing ~$950 on the partner direct site. of course, can't drop server 2k8 from the configuration online unfortunately. that would bring it down at least 300, maybe more.
Click to expand...

Hopefully the following link works:
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-t110-2/fs

Select the "Enhanced" model for $459

Buy the memory from another source: Newegg had 4GB modules for $44 each.

Remember - this is Dell Small Business - not enterprise ...not EPP ..not Home, etc.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Interesting, thanks for the info.

NetJunkie,

On another note, hows the performance on the DS211+. I need a NAS for home and while the DS1511+ would be great its a little out of my price range.
Click to expand...

No idea. This will be my first one. Get the DS1511. ;)
 
So...I can build an 8GB host for $420/each. Build list:

TYAN S5510GM3NR Micro ATX Server Motherboard
Intel G620 CPU
Kingston 8GB ECC RAM
Rosewill R379-M Black/ Silver 0.8mm SGCC Steel Slim MicroATX Computer Case with ATX12V Flex 300W Power Supply
Power adapter cable
4GB USB Thumb Drive
Two quiet fans to replace the loud ones in the cheap case

That's everything but VMDirectPath. It's basically Jase McCarty's "cheap" lab build spec. If it was me, and I'll make it an option for the other guys, I'd get the Dell 110 II. The build isn't bad though...get 3 NICs on the Tyan so that's all good. They can do a better CPU if they want VMDirectPath.

Thoughts?

And I'm all about diskless boot. I also sell a lot of Cisco UCS and I'm all about boot from SAN for those. If your production SAN is down you're F'd. I don't care if Windows stays alive because it's on local..your data is down and that's the priority. If your SAN has to go down for an upgrade...well...anything outside of a complete head swap...you need to rethink your storage vendor of choice. ;)
 
Nice choice, includes iKVM as well. I would definately go with this but i'd scrap that powersupply and go with a Corsair 400. Corsair is all I use and never had a single problem.
 
Meh. It's cheap. If it dies they can pick another one. :) My max is $1500 on this build. I was shooting for less but can't make it happen.
 
NetJunkie said:
So...I can build an 8GB host for $420/each. Build list:

TYAN S5510GM3NR Micro ATX Server Motherboard
Intel G620 CPU
Kingston 8GB ECC RAM
Rosewill R379-M Black/ Silver 0.8mm SGCC Steel Slim MicroATX Computer Case with ATX12V Flex 300W Power Supply
Power adapter cable
4GB USB Thumb Drive
Two quiet fans to replace the loud ones in the cheap case

That's everything but VMDirectPath. It's basically Jase McCarty's "cheap" lab build spec. If it was me, and I'll make it an option for the other guys, I'd get the Dell 110 II. The build isn't bad though...get 3 NICs on the Tyan so that's all good. They can do a better CPU if they want VMDirectPath.

Thoughts?
<snipped the rest>
Click to expand...

I'd definitely buy and build that system for myself if I was in the market right now.
If it was for someone else though, I'd probably spend the extra for the T110-II just
so _they_ would only have to call a single support number - not my own.

It definitely seems to meet your requirements ... does the T110 + storage put you over $1500 whereas the whitebox does not?

I never asked what they would be doing with them .... so... what are they going to do with them? (ie type and number of VMs)
 
Hah, this thread came to the same conclusion I had.
Few weeks ago I bough a T110 II

Pros
two onboard usb ports are useful.
The 4x 3.5 hdd bays are nice, tool-less trays are a nice touch.
being on the ESXi HCL is always nice
nice pcie configuration1-16x(8 electrical) 1-8x 1-4x 1-1x

Cons
only 1 Gigabit interface is a drag.
No sata3 on the C202 chipset
not all 3.5->2.5in hdd adapters sit in these trays nicely, not horribly but only the forward mounting pegs engage and they hang upside down. not really a big deal, but worth mentioning

I went the same route and bough ram separately for ~38/stick up to 16gb.
Although expandable to 32gb the 8gb sticks are ridiculously expensive

Extremely happy with the purchase. I use the server in production for the small business. It has been fantastic. No complaints.
 
Netwerkz101 said:
I'd definitely buy and build that system for myself if I was in the market right now.
If it was for someone else though, I'd probably spend the extra for the T110-II just
so _they_ would only have to call a single support number - not my own.

It definitely seems to meet your requirements ... does the T110 + storage put you over $1500 whereas the whitebox does not?

I never asked what they would be doing with them .... so... what are they going to do with them? (ie type and number of VMs)
Click to expand...

This is a reference build for my delivery engineers. So they don't care about calling a single number for support and this won't be a box in production. They'll be used as home lab setups for whatever vSphere labs they want to do.
 
How about the HP Micro Server ? The are normally sold with a nice cash back. Here in the UK for example you get £100 cash back from HP when buying an N36L.. I have upgraded it to 8 GB of Ram (from 1GB standard). It comes with a 250 GB SATA which I removed. I then bought 4x 2TB SATA disks from Seagate ('green disks' running at 5900rpm) and used the onboard USB port to install ESXi on. the onboard fake raid is no use as ESXi will still see each raid member as single disk, but any Adaptec (2405,3805,5805) works well, providing proper raid capabilities (or Areca and some HP low profile raid cards).

The server itself, 8GB of ram, disks and IPMI cost me £340 (British Pounds). Not sure about raid cards as we are Adaptec OEM partner so I didn't pay (much) for the card. Oh, paid £8 for the USB stick (plus £50 for the IPMI but it isn't needed really) ;)

With a Supermicro caddy (4x1TB 2.5" in the odd bay) you can get up to 16TB raw storage in that little thing, but you'd probably run out of ram / CPU before you run out of storage (good for NAS, probably not so good as for 10s of VMs).
 
You guys in the UK get a lot better deal on the Microservers than we do. They are like double the price in the US. Just not worth it for something that tops out at 8GB of RAM.
 
NetJunkie said:
So...I can build an 8GB host for $420/each. Build list:

TYAN S5510GM3NR Micro ATX Server Motherboard
Intel G620 CPU
Kingston 8GB ECC RAM
Rosewill R379-M Black/ Silver 0.8mm SGCC Steel Slim MicroATX Computer Case with ATX12V Flex 300W Power Supply
Power adapter cable
4GB USB Thumb Drive
Two quiet fans to replace the loud ones in the cheap case

<snipped>
Click to expand...

I just realized something ... if you select the cheapest T110-II model @ $289
and upgrade to the G620 processor, it comes to $348 in cart.
This is Small Business again with a $187 instant discount applied.

Brings the price difference between white-box and HCL-box much closer.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-t110-2/pd
 
Did you order already?? If not, now is the time!!!!


http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-t110-2/fs

Save 33% off select* PowerEdge Tower Servers priced $799 or more before taxes and fees. Enter coupon* code 7GV42XFL7MRWC0 at check out.

Coupon code* 7GV42XFL7MRWC0

One coupon per customer. One time use only. Non-transferable. Offers not combinable with other offers, discounts or coupons. Limit of 3 promotional items per customer. Offer limited to PowerEdge T110II, T310, T410 & T610 Tower Servers priced $799 or more before taxes and fees. Offer valid 10/17 – 10/21 at 11:59pm CT.
 
I just configured the following for myself
- Core i3 2100
- AsRock H67M-GE
- 16GB DDR3 non-ECC ram
- Be Quiet 300W PSU
- Fractal Design Core 1000 case

This all together is less than 400 euro's (VAT in Belgium is 21%).

Some remarks though:
- Not clear whether the NIC works out of the box. I've seen people say it works with the OEM edit, others say out of the box. Whatever it is, it works.
- No storage as I'm providing datastores from my home NAS over NFS.
- Only 16GB max on the H67 board.
- Only 1 NIC. If you want more you'll need to buy 'em.
- No ECC memory. This depends on what you want to do with the server.

The reason why I went with this config is because I wanted an ESX server for my home lab that wouldn't kill the power bill and my bank account (still live at home. God bless my parents). On the other hand, it's still powerful enough for home stuff.

The previous config I was considering was the following:
- Xeon E3-1220
- Supermicro X9SCM-F
- 16GB Unbuffered ECC DDR3

Downsides were the higher price, the higher power use and the config simply being overpowered for what I need. Geek factor was higher tho ... .
 
young_einstein said:
Doesn't appear to work on the Australian Dell store ... bugger! :(
Click to expand...

Sorry.... i forget to add it's usally just the U.S.A. that gets certain coupon deals.

The deal ended yesterday. It also may have been sort of a price mistake
because I was able to stack promotions up to Thursday night, but on Friday
that was not possible and the price went up - though the 33% off still worked.


Anyhow ... great deal... I am sure another will come as they pop up 2-3 times a year.
 
So ... If I'm more interested in setting up a lab for learning/studying, meaning that I want to support the more advanced features [like HA / DRS / FT] instead of just trying to build the cheapest box possible, does anybody have any suggestions/recommendations what I should be looking at? I'm having a bit of a hard time trying to decipher the VMWare HCL at the moment ...

Would a pair of machines based on a Supermicro X9SCM-F + Xeon E3-1230 actually support all those features?

[I've already got the storage side of things sorted out, so that's not an issue.]

FWIW ... I'm going with the Supermicro board, because it doesn't seem like anyone actually stocks Tyan boards here in Australia.

In there anything else that you might recommend instead?
 
Does anyone have a source with dell or coupons for R210 II's with E1230+ processors? I am interested in swapping out some of my higher power home lab (2950's) with those if the price is right..
 
young_einstein said:
So ... If I'm more interested in setting up a lab for learning/studying, meaning that I want to support the more advanced features [like HA / DRS / FT] instead of just trying to build the cheapest box possible [...]

Would a pair of machines based on a Supermicro X9SCM-F + Xeon E3-1230 actually support all those features? [...]

In there anything else that you might recommend instead?
Click to expand...
I'd be interested in hearing feedback too!

Similar goals, and that seems to be the nicest combination I've stumbled across in my price range. (Although I'll probably initially build the systems w/ i3-2100s, then upgrade to Xeon 1230s and use the i3s in other builds)

Also, is there any chance I can get your storage ideas? Either PM or here. I haven't dug into that yet, and it's be nice to get a thread to follow.
 
I am going to be picking up a Dell T310 for my virtualization lab, originally I was planning on sticking with VMware workstation and a seperate NAS for storage but decided that a dedicated host would be a much better solution.

I will be buying the server with the only factory installed upgrades being a PERC H200 RAID Controller, Hot Plug and LCD upgrade, and an X3430 @ 2.4 GHz.

I will grab 32 GB of DDR3 and 4 X 1TB 7.2k RPM drives off of Newegg. Total cost should be right around $1200-1400.

I plan to run ESXi 4.1 as the main hypervisor and a few nested vSphere 5 VM's
 
l plan to run ESXi 4.1 as the main hypervisor and a few nested vSphere 5 VM's
Click to expand...

I don't think that's going to allow you to run nested 64bit VM's. You should run 5.0 as the main hypervisor and 5.0 ESXi VM's. 4.1 does not allow for 64bit nested VM's. Since your running a single host, which I do as well, you can run Free ESXi 5.0 and then run the 60day trials like I do for the ESXi hosts. This will allow you to run 64bit nested VM's with a simple change to vhv.allow = "TRUE" to /etc/vmware/config on the physical ESXi host.
 
Ugh, of course, what was I thinking!

I'll run the ESXi 5 Hypervisor on the box.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top