Home Lab Build - vSphere 5

[Deleted member 16178]

Just deciding on getting my home lab up and going. Going to try to stick with a smaller box with 2 nested ESXi servers.

Proposed Specs:

• SuperMicro X9SCM-F w/ IPMI
• Intel Xeon e3-1230 CPU w/ Hyperthreading
• 16 GB - Kingston ValueRAM ECC UDIMM (planning to upgrade to 32 GB once prices come down)
• LSI 9260-4i w/ 512MB Cache & BBU
• (4) Hitachi 3 TB drives on LSI
• (1) Hitachi 3 TB drive onboard for backups
• Rosewill 450 watt PSU
• NH-U9B SE2 CPU Cooler
• Lian Li PC-A04B Mini Tower

Planning on using PCI passthrough to present the LSI card to my file server VM. Regarding storage for the other VMs, I was planning on installing the hypervisor to a USB stick and exporting NFS on the file server. Will have to test everything out to see how well that will work.

Thoughts?

 

[aggiec05]

pretty much exactly what I am saving to build except a different case. I like it!

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Get the X9SCL+-F instead. Both its NICs are natively supported by ESXi.

Unless you think you'll really need the built-in SATA3 support or the fourth PCIe slot. Nothing you list will take advantage of either.

 

[Deleted member 16178]

Get the X9SCL+-F instead. Both its NICs are natively supported by ESXi.

Unless you think you'll really need the built-in SATA3 support or the fourth PCIe slot. Nothing you list will take advantage of either.

The price ended up being only a couple dollars more for the X9SCM-F.

Anyone know where to get cheap 8 GB DDR3 ECC UDIMMs?