New build for Vm Server

[CiscoInside]

Hey all...

I am currently working on a new build for my VMs, this is basically what I have purchased so far:

3 kits of:
PGV38G1333ELK Patriot G Series ‘Sector 5’ Edition 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model PGV38G1333ELK

1 of:
Intel BX80601960 Core i7 960 Processor - 3.20GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 4.8GT/s QPI, HyperThreading, Quad Core, Bloomfield, LGA 1366, Retail

Now I am purchasing as I see deals.. I saw this pop up a little while ago, I am a little weary on the reviews but mostly what do you think of this board:
EVGA 141-BL-E757-RX LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard

It is re-certified so if I did purchase it I might purchase the 1 year extended warranty on it, but again I am a little weary on it.

I was also looking at purchasing 4 of these:

Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

to setup a RAID5, the price does see low enough on them.

Thoughts?

 

[Child of Wonder]

RAID won't work on an ESXi host unless you get a hardware RAID card that is on the storage HCL.

Personally, my advice would be to not even bother setting up one beefy server like that and then run everything on local storage. Get two cheap AMD Phenom IIs, 8-16GB of RAM per host, and two AMD motherboards with PCI-E. Then go onto ebay and find a pair of PCI-E dual port Intel or Broadcom Gb NICs.

Then set up a simple NFS SAN using Openfiler. All you need there is a cheap dual core, 2GB of RAM, two Gb NICs, and 4x250GB WD RE drives in RAID 5.

Then you can play with vCenter, VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, DRS, etc. Those are the things that make VMware the leader in server virtualization, not just the hypervisor.

 

[CiscoInside]

I will be installing a striped down linux distro on the box and running VMServer on it. This way I can handle the onboard RAID and get past most of the hardware reqs that are required for ESXi.

I am not so much looking to build an ESXi lab, I already have that. I am more looking to have a bunch of my VMs running on one machine to save power costs vs individual boxes. But the NAS idea is in the works, I am looking at turning an oldish machine I have into one.

But I do agree with you on the different products besides hypervisor standing very important for Vmware, there is a ton of very important products like View that is pushing business more daily.

 

[Child of Wonder]

I will be installing a striped down linux distro on the box and running VMServer on it. This way I can handle the onboard RAID and get past most of the hardware reqs that are required for ESXi.

I am not so much looking to build an ESXi lab, I already have that. I am more looking to have a bunch of my VMs running on one machine to save power costs vs individual boxes. But the NAS idea is in the works, I am looking at turning an oldish machine I have into one.

But I do agree with you on the different products besides hypervisor standing very important for Vmware, there is a ton of very important products like View that is pushing business more daily.

OK. I figured this was another one of those "Help me build a VMware lab!" threads in which the person talks about wanting to build a super beefy single ESXi box with local storage.

Waste of time IMO.

 

[CiscoInside]

Oh I agree, for a lab it is overkill. I just can't wait to offload my current vms off my old box so I can finally turn it into a NAS, and start playing with that.