• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

My mini-itx diskless ESXi 4.1 setup

V

Vengance_01

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Dec 23, 2001
Messages
7,712
Here is my plan. I have been wanting to build a small, low powered SAN device for quite some time. I have also wanted to build a nice ESXi box for my home lab and learning purposes. I also want to host a media VM for PS3 media sever, torrent downloading, etc... I want to keep these boxes separate, low powered,small, and low cost so I can build a second for vmotion fun in the near future.. So here is a list of my parts.

SAN:
HP ProLiant AMD Athlon II NEO N36L 1.3GHZ Dual core micro server
4GB DDR3 G-Skill Ram
4x 1TB Samsung 7200RPM drives (Free for now, will borrow from work for testing)
1x 160GB 7200RPM drive to boot some Nix distro or package that can use ZFS (free)

The box has a decent built in Gigabit Ethernet. For now this will work, but the box has 2 PCI-Express slot open for E-SATA and a Intel NIC card to be added later.

ESXi box: (remember this is for home use only)
Antec ISK 310-150 Black case with 150 watt PSU
Intel BOXDH57JG Mini-ITX
Core I3 550
8GB DDR3 Ram
160GB 2.5inch Laptop drive for ESXi 4.1 install
On-board Intel Gigabit
VM datastore connect by NSF or ISCIS depending which has better performance.

The motherboard has a single PCI-Express x4 slot which I would add a dual Intel nic card to give my ESXi server a total of 3 nics in the near future.

This is my plan. Without the main storage disks, total cost should be under 900$. Now I am betting I might be able to build an all in one box that's better or cheaper, but I want to keep them separate just in case I decide to sell my ESXi box, I would still have my NAS.
 
I'd use a 4 GB CF or SD card connected via IDE or SATA converter for the ESXi host rather than a 160 GB HD, unless you already have the 160 GB HD on hand. Unless you are wanting to store templates or some other VM items locally on the box instead of using them from the NAS.
 
ESXi can be installed on a bootable USB drive for < $8.
No need for the laptop drive. You can put that money toward your NAS.
 
I already have it. But I will try with a flash drive as well. Just looking for everything to be inside the case.
 
Hello all,

I did combine the n36l microserver with a HP Smart Array p410 raid controller with 512MB cache (with battery)(controller price in the Netherlands is in or about 270 Euro (now already down to 250 euro)).
The setup is combined with 2 x 4Gb Kingston memory and 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptors.
I made 2 blog entries on installation and VMware ESXi installation.
They can be found here:

http://deludi.nl/blog/vbscript/vari...-microserver-and-the-hp-p410-raid-controller/

http://deludi.nl/blog/vbscript/vari...erver-and-the-hp-p410-raid-controller-part-2/

I will write a third entry on actually running the VM’s.
If all works well the server will be a production server for one of my customers.

Best regards,

dirk adamsky
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top