Seeking low price, low power ESXi machine.

B

BurntToast

2[H]4U
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Jun 14, 2003
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Looking to virtualize pFsense, Server 2012 and FreeNAS. Might possibly get into one or two others as well.

Currently looking at the ASRock E350M1 AMD E-350. I have read some documentation and it appears that it will work. Just that I would need to pick up an Intel dual nic card. On-board raid doesn’t look supported.

Are there any other options in this area besides dual core Atoms… which don’t support virtualization? Willing to spend a little more. More concerned about heat than anything else.
This is for a home test lab.
 
Are you looking to virtualize FreeNAS just to learn it or to actually apply it to a storage pool? I'd strongly recommend against using a FreeNAS VM to manage any data you actually care about.

But anyway what's your budget for this machine?
 
The embedded motherboard above cost around $100, I could stretch to as much as $250 (mobo/cpu) for the right hardware. Anything more and I might as well retire my main box. But I'm not looking for a 24/7 system that consumes this much power.
 
BurntToast said:
Looking around.. I'm starting to consider the i3-4130T and ASRock E3C226D2I. The board is not yet out. I'm betting it will be way out of my range. But I'll keep tabs on it.

http://www.asrock.com/server/overview.asp?Model=E3C226D2I

I could go with a mAXT or even ATX if you know of one.
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I just bought that ASRock board off Superbiz last week that I'm pairing with an i3-4130 for a dedicated storage server. It's not cheap at all though it ran me about $220.

You may also want to look into the new Avaton integrated boards coming out in a few weeks. The benchmarks on them are looking very impressive.

http://www.servethehome.com/Server-...8-core-avoton-rangeley-benchmarks-fast-power/

The benchmarks were done on Supermicro boards but ASRock has a pair of Avaton integrated boards coming out real soon as well.
 
When I had a quad core phenom II server pulls according to the Kill-A-Watt 110-120 watts of power. Would that be too much?
 
Pick up a used Mac Mini off of craigslist or something.

Small, quiet, little heat and works pretty well.
 
Their last set of ITX boards were north of $400. I'll stick with an Intel NUC for that much. I can say that the IB Celeron's are pretty darn fast for what they are. I built a firewall with a Gigabyte Celeron 847 (IIRC) for a client but tested that board with Server 2012 R2 on an SSD first. It booted in under 10 seconds using an X-25V 40GB SSD. Plenty fast enough for what I was testing.
 
peanuthead said:
Their last set of ITX boards were north of $400. I'll stick with an Intel NUC for that much. I can say that the IB Celeron's are pretty darn fast for what they are. I built a firewall with a Gigabyte Celeron 847 (IIRC) for a client but tested that board with Server 2012 R2 on an SSD first. It booted in under 10 seconds using an X-25V 40GB SSD. Plenty fast enough for what I was testing.
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These are what I'm interested in, not the SuperMicro boards which tend to be very expensive.

http://www.asrock.com/server/overview.asp?Model=C2750D4I

http://www.asrock.com/server/overview.asp?Model=C2550D4I

Max 64GB of RAM and 12 Sata ports on a Mini-ITX board is impressive.
 
I'm using a Dell T320 at home which only draws around 140w with full drives and ram but it's not cheap. You could probably just find a used Mini like was said or even just any used intel based system with an intel nic would run it. pfsense isn't very resource intensive, without knowing what your 2012 deployment is going to do though it's hard to guess. I've ran ESXi off of dual core laptops in the past but I wasn't pushing them.
 
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