ESX hardware recommendation

[Theprof]

Hello,

I am looking at setting up ESX for my home lab and I would like to know what you ladies and gents recommend. So far at a local futureshop I found a few pc's with the following specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5200+ 2.7Ghz
3GB DDR2 RAM
500GB HD which I will make into a raid for mirroring.
10/100MB NIC

$379(CAD)

Or

Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 2Ghz
3GB DDR 2 RAM
500 GB Hard drive which will be in a raid for mirroring.
10/100/1000 NIC

$349(CAD)


What I would be running in the virtual environment is:

1 X Windows Server 2003 Standard AD/DC
1 X Windows Server 2008 Enterprise member server for testing.
1 X Windows Server 2003 Standard WSUS
1 X Windows Vista Ultimate
1 X Windows XP Home Edition

I might add one or two more servers such as a 2k3 server for TS in the future.

BTW I own both vista and XP and as for the server OS's and ESX I'll be using the eval edition for now until I can afford to buy a license.

Any opinions or recommendations will be appreciated.

Thank you.

[zebulebu]

Prof - ESX is pretty fussy about what hardware it will run on. You need specific NICs, Storage and Processors - though there are posts on the community forums about running ESX on plenty of hardware that is 'officially not supported'.

Your best bet is to take a look at the ESX hardware compatibility list (current one for 3.5 is here - check out the .pdfs and confirm that your storage and NIC is supported.

[Theprof]

Originally Posted by zebulebu

Prof - ESX is pretty fussy about what hardware it will run on. You need specific NICs, Storage and Processors - though there are posts on the community forums about running ESX on plenty of hardware that is 'officially not supported'.

Your best bet is to take a look at the ESX hardware compatibility list (current one for 3.5 is here - check out the .pdfs and confirm that your storage and NIC is supported.

Interesting I didn't know that ESX is picky about hardware. I will definitely look into that. Thanks for the heads up and the link, much appreciated.

[zebulebu]

Originally Posted by Theprof

Interesting I didn't know that ESX is picky about hardware.

Oh - you have NO idea, believe me...

Actually, if you take a look at the VMWare community forums you'll find that, whilst ESX 'officially' only supports a small number of systems, this is largely because these have all been extensively stress-tested. After all, ESX is Enterprise-class virtualisation - it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have to support thousands of different combinations of hardware when you can just narrow it down to a few tried and trusted environments.

Like I said, just because VMWare don't support ESX running on certain systems, doesn't mean it won't run on them. Once you have the processor sorted, and are sure its on the ESX compatibility list, your main problem will be in getting storage and NICs that are compatible - but, again, there's loads of info on the community forums - search for the stuff you have and chances are it will either work or have a bodge-up that enables support for it.

HTH

[Theprof]

This is something that I will be doing in the future as I was told by my boss, I will be doing some vmware training over the next little while although I don't know for sure when. I just want to familiarize my self with this technology because I know it's going to make it easier for me when I do the training, I won't have to worry about little things here and there when I could probably learn on my own, instead I want to concentrate on the more complicated stuff, which is where ESX comes in.

Now I don't know a whole lot about it but I do understand the concept and I learn best from hands and doing theory second. I know it's supposed to be the other way around but it's just how I function. I know that you're working on something similar but more advanced so I figured I could learn a few things here and there.

I'll be honest I haven't done any research regarding the supported hardware, but I do intend to do so, it's just a matter of for me to sit down for a good hour and see what users are recommending, what's supported and what's not supported, etc.

Again thanks for info Zeb, you probably saved me some time.