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Potential whitebox ESXi build

B

batteriesnotincluded

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2007
Messages
1,195
I'm currently negotiating with my boss about how much he'd like to spend on my home ESXi server, if anything. He said he was willing to, but I have a feeling that'll mean a T310 or something that's probably too loud, and definitely more expensive than I have in mind...but if he wants to pay for it, I'll just have to learn to live with the noise.


But, if I do it on my own, I'm looking at the following:

Inwin mATX chassis with 350W PSU (I've had good luck with them, and they're cheap)
SuperMicro MBD X9SCM-F mATX motherboard
Xeon E3-1230
Patriot 8GB flash drive (really, I'll probably just use my 4GB and keep the 8 for myself)
32GB Kingston DDR3 ECC/Registered.

It comes out to about $720 before shipping, about half the price of a T110II with just 16Gb RAM.


I also have a desktop I asked about earlier, which I think I'll be converting to a FreeNAS based NFS server.
Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, various hard drives (I have 2 80s, a 200, and will put in a 120 and maybe something else. Mish-mash, but beats the hell out of the Dlink NAS I have at home).

I also have the laptop in my signature which I'll probably set up on a second flash drive to run as a secondary ESXI 5 server if & when I'm ready to play around with having 2 servers talking to a single NAS, or will build another server at that time.

Any critiques, suggestions, etc. would be welcome.
 
I think you're right. I was looking at ECC and forgot to check the other part.

Ok, so that knocks it down $120 and puts me at 16GB of unbuffered/ECC Crucial.
 
Will two nic ports be enough? I am looking at dual Intel PCIe nic cards to keep iscsi/management/production network traffic separated.
 
For a lab 2 nics is fine. More is better obviously, depending on what you want to do with the lab. You can easily pick up dual port Intel gige nics on fleebay for $50.
 
I can always add more in the future. I figured I'd have 2 NICs on the server, and 2 NICs on the FreeNAS box. I'll need to pick up an 8 port (or more) GigE switch. If I bring my Elitebook online to act as a secondary server while training, it'll have a single NIC only.


This isn't for production use, and I'm sure my performance is going to be hindered greatly by the shitty old 7.2k RPM hard drives I'll be putting in the tower as opposed to new 15k RPM ones like we have in our EMC SANs.
 
FYI on the x9scm-f. It has 4 pin fan connectors on the motherboard. So you may need to replace the fans in your case (no big deal). SuperMicro does not recommend mixing fan types.
 
bmeehan said:
FYI on the x9scm-f. It has 4 pin fan connectors on the motherboard. So you may need to replace the fans in your case (no big deal). SuperMicro does not recommend mixing fan types.
Click to expand...

I think I have a couple PWM fans (I know I do in 120mm that are freaking loud, which I don't want to use), but I could just use a 3 pin to 4 pin adapter and bypass the motherboard. I don't remember those fans being particularly loud at 12V, but if I'm too terribly worried, I can run it at 7V or something.

But thanks for the heads up!
 
I hope I did the right thing...

I just picked up a Dell R210ii off Dell Outlet. Xeon E3-1230, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD for $599, with a 3 year warranty.

The boss didn't want me to get a whitebox, so I may just hit him up for an upgrade on the RAM to 16GB, or hold off until 32GB is reasonably priced. But, there's a chance he's paying for everything, since he wants to get a few of these to set up HA for testing once we get the new office.

I also picked up a managed 16 port GigE switch so I can work with VLans, and maybe link aggregation if FreeNAS will let me.


I will probably pull the 500GB drive and put it in my FreeNAS box...but just for curiosity's sake, is there a way (probably with VT-D) to hook up one of those drives as it's currently configured to a VM? I'm thinking about putting my Raptor in in the R210ii, formatting it in VMFS or whatever, running Server 2008 R2 on it, and putting my 1TB drive that has all my files on it in there to let it be a file server. Is there a way to do this while leaving the 1TB drive as it is (NTFS)?


Also, I assume there wouldn't be an issue if it does allow this, but assuming this personal file server is set up as a local datastore, there shouldn't be an issue with setting up HA for the datastore from the FreeNAS once we get more PCs or I set up my laptop for testing HA, should there?
 
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