What is esxi whitebox

ESXi 5. Connect on: Facebook. Feel free to network via Twitter vladan. Hey Vladan, very nice article, thanks again! This will keep power flowing, even in idle-mode advanced power mode which is why the PSU will not shut itself down. Keep up the good work! Hey Vladan, such a nice build for home lab. Mine is running an iK from the previous haswell generation ivy bridge with 64Gb of ram.

Currently i run nested VM inside workstation on top of server as an os but I don t know if i won t put directly ESXi on host supported NIC will be the issue, got an intel onbaord network controler but think it won t be detected by esxi and then run nested esxi on top of the host.

Nested lab, through VMware Workstation is definitely good for learning. But when you want to push some perfs, then the bare metal is the way to go.

You can still do nested ESXi s there…. Intel desktop LAN adapters are pretty cheap. Another fan of your articles. This one actually inspired me to finally enter in process of building home virtualization lab.

I was considering to make it for a long time, but scanning all options and possibilities, going from one extreme to another, it got postponed. After reading your article I opted to proceed with some basic investment for such a lab. As it will be my first lab and my first build , I prefer to take some time to scan everything before continuing. Purpose of the home lab would be to extend my knowledge in virtualization with accent to VMware hypervisor ESXi.

It might end up with obtaining some VCP certificates as well. So, from your experience, will the Haswell ESXi lab built from components you described be sufficient for such purpose? Energy saving matters here, so i7 S looks like a good choice. If necessary I will extend it which is why I would opt for a different box, which supports more 2. Sorry for a longer post and keep up with good work. Thanks for your comment.

Hi Vladan, I am one of long time follower of your articles. Thanks for sharing your haswell based esxi whitebox configuration. I have built a similar configuration but used gigabyte z87m-d3h and i haswell chipset. I am upadting my blog with the lessons learnt using this motherboard in my blog so others can be benifitted. Thanks for sharing. So, for Hi, I have updated about my Haswell build experience at my blog and given reference to your posts wherever applicable. Hi Vladan, thank you very much for writing about your experience here — it helped me a lot!

I build up nearly the same environment than you:. I want to setup a home Lab server. The Haswell i7 CPU is suitable budget to me. Does this motherboard gigabyte b85m — hd3 support ESXI?

Can I just use on board lan card? Better buy an additional NIC, e. Hi Galileo, Please keep us posted your findings about B85 chipset. As mentioned by Alex, vladan and in my blog, on board LAN controllers are not supported as on date. You may have to use add-on network controllers. Or by installing it in an already setup esxi instance, as so. Many thanks for sharing I VIB here!

Can you confirm it working with L and I? The ee driver has supported the iv for a year now, since release 2. One would hope that ESXI 5. Finally I installed it after once the original ee driver got stuck and the vnic has been deconfigured by ESXi. I have just installed ESXI 5.

The version of the ee driver installed as standard in ESXI 5. With the right tools. What Motherboard and cpu would you recommend? Low power consumption is desired. To storage: storage DRS i something I have not tested yet. Or is a more enterprise solution needed for SDRS? Nice, I built something similar myself. Nice build with good learning curve.

Hello Vladan, very interesting choices you have going on here. Personally like many of your visitors I am looking at building my own lab for studying. Would this setup in particular be powerful enough to run this kind of lab? It depends also where you lives. I have spent a lot of time now trying to find a Vsphere whitebox with these spec: — small, small, small — cheap — low power — 64 GB ram would have liked ECC — quiet.

Yeah, the was gonna be my choice for 64Gb of RAM too. For quiet whitebox there is no place for spinning disks. I want to build new home lab based on i7 Haswell. Did any one test it? I was able to inject the vib file posted by davec into esxi 5. Perhaps the community has a driver compiled, try to look around.

Good luck! Thanks Kranz. Do you know, is there and HDD size limit? What do you mean? Concerning individual drive size, it depends the RAID controller sitting underneath supported? Is that still only possible using Socket ?

PS can anyone recommend a decent GPU? I will post my results when I am done. Very good article as the rest of them, I found your blog last week and I subscribed immediately. Keep up the good work. Should I use my VM server to host the storage server as well or build separate machine and leave more power for the VMs? The downside of that is when you reboot the ESXi you need to bring the Nexenta first and then the rest, but I can cope with that. Depends on your budget. If you calculate every piece, for physical lab with a couple of whiteboxes, switch, cabling, separate physical shared storage, you will probably want to start with single box… There is no single answer, but 32Gb of RAM allows quite a lot.

Thanks for sharing great information. I guess it would be like saying you drive a Hyundai instead of Honda. For the record, Super Micro has a large selection of server hardware to choose from with a similar configuration to Dell and HP.

And they also have a blade and chassis for high-density computing. On the ABMX website, you can choose from a variety of 1u, 2u, 3u, 4u, and blade server hardware configurations. Just like a candy store at the mall, ABMX has everything a server hardware guru could ever dream of. With a fantastic white box server inventory to choose from, Servers Direct is also located in Sunny California, and has been doing business for 10 years.

Build Your Own — Open Compute Designs are becoming more popular, and the Open Compute Project is the place to visit for ideas on open server, storage, network, and data center designs. They build a robust white box server made from Super Micro parts. I have been pleased with their servers for building ESXi and Xen clusters.

They offer low-cost servers, as well as white box network and storage products. Best of all here are the benefits of ordering server hardware from Amazon:. Bonus: Low-cost brand name server parts. Well, there you have them. Seven brands and vendors offer too many server options to compare or review. And each has hardware solutions that are perfect for your budget or ego.

We covered server hardware from the best of brands manufacturers, white boxes that are low cost and cheap, and open compute servers. Given most chips and components are made by the same people in the same factories; the real differences you are paying for are brand name, features, and support.

Thanks for your interest. Note: I have moved to Bluehost to consolidate my hosting maintenance. Joe believes creating the best user experience is his top priority, which is why he's been sharing his ideas, experiences, and advice on VMinstall.

Feel free to leave Joe a comment below When was this article published? Hi Jerry, Thanks for the comment. But the most important of all, is it any good? Maybe that will speed it up a bit. CPU load is as expected very low, MHz on average.

The total memory load when running all those 9 virtual machine is 8,5 — 9GB! You must be logged in to post a comment. Hint and tips for those of you who want to build their own ESXi whitebox: Research, research, research. I still hear people buy incompatible hardware despite the available online resources. I mentioned two of them above, check if your desired configuration has already been build. If not Google is your friend; Do not save on your harddisk.