need a little help with this config

[Mackintire]

So I have a very limited budget and am trying to sell a senior manager on virtualizing a few of our boxes.

I was planning on purchaing a proliant ML150 G6 w/xeon E5530 and adding the following:

16GB of EEC RAM
HP P410 Smart Array
6 WD RE4 500GB drives
A decent flash drive to load EXSi 4.0 on



So the plan to to make a RAID 10 out of (4) of the RE4 drives and use that for mounting the VMs

So my first question is can I use VT-d with the motherboard and CPU

Because of budget constraints and other requirements I need the cheapest Hardware RAID card that I can use that support VTd and use the other two RE4 drives in RAID 1

That mirrored datastore would be backed up weekly to our NAS.

If the RAID 1 array had performance similar to a single drive that's fine, but doing this as inexpensively as possible is the goal.

FYI... the machines being virtualized are as follows:

# 1 windows XP machine that is currently being way over taxed as a services (server)
# 2 Windows XP machine used to compile code with a built in licensing server module
# 3 Windows SBS machine that will replace machine #1
# 4 development console....using for testing.....destroyed over and over again as a test bed for software.
# 5 Ubuntu Server machine used for various linux services and licensing server

 

[dashpuppy]

That looks like a nice 10K$ server right there

 

[MikeTrike]

That looks like a nice 10K$ server right there

Man, I built some Dual Octo Core AMD's with 64GB of RAM and 8 x RE3's for under $5k. That also included a FirePro 2GB GPU for RemoteFX and an Adaptec RAID card + Cache addon (EDIT: flash module).

I needed more space, so I opted for RAID6+Hot Spare on the 8 drives.

I love Supermicro.

EDIT: If you'd like to know the parts, let me know and I'll list them up if you're curious.

EDIT 2: Supermicro has similar Intel platforms as well, if Intel is the preferred (or required?) platform.

 

[Mackintire]

That looks like a nice 10K$ server right there

10K? Try $2K

anyhow.... I think I may have figured out an alternative using a small QNAP device.