ESXi 5 on Mac Mini Server

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Has anyone attempted this? I am really tempted to do this and if it works I would pick up 2 Mac Mini Servers, upgrade them to 16GB of memory each and have a little environment to play with and prepare for exams.

 

Part of the reason I am tempted to do this, is because these Mac mini servers are tiny, don't consume much power, and are pretty quiet... Unfortunately, I don't have a dedicated place to put servers in an area where the noise would not matter, other wise, I'd be getting servers + switches and run a nice lab

 

Any particular HP server you recommend?

 

Those little HP mini's are awesome. I did my study with that and a PC running work station, they are also way cheaper than the Mini, though considerably bigger.

If you aren't too bothered about getting one right now, keep an eye out on your local retailers as I know that HP keep doing £100 off the price of the server via a rebate. I think that takes the price of the server to sub £100, which is astonishing value for such good kit.

 

Ml110 G6 16 GB ram max and you won't hear a thing

 

The ML110 is deffinatly a more capable bit of kit, but quite a bit bigger and deffinatly noiser than the microserver.

 

The Micro HP server is really tempting to get... I forgot to mention that the Mac Mini Server comes with an i7 which is really nice to have ;) I have to think about this, I used to have the HP ML110 G6, but when I switched jobs, I had to give it back.

 

And that is the big difference, the Microserver lacks grunt when it comes to raw power which the Mac Mini has. However you could buy 2 Microservers for the same price.

 

Or just build your own mini server and make do with that instead.

Motherboard

Mini ITX case

and even go as far as internal USB header if the motherboard doesn't have one

USB Header

You can do that for less money than the Apple Mac Mini server and it's all new gear.

 

I was actually thinking about building a custom lab server.. just haven't done the research. For now, I can get away with VMware workstation, but I'll be building/buying something soon, kinda getting sick of workstation, need something bigger!

The only thing that's saving me right now, is Workstation 8 Shared Virtual Machines!!

 

Hmm, now I wonder if I could shoehorn Hyper-V on to something like that.

 

I'm not sure about ESXi, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get Hyper-V running on it? After all, Apple release Windows 7 compatible drivers.

16GB of RAM (2x 8GB SODIMMS) can be had for under £80, so you could get a fairly decent VM host running. You could even hook it up to a storage array via. Thunderbolt! Of course, this is all quite pricey, but it'd be a pretty neat solution.

Personally, I opted against the MicroServer because it only supports 8GB of RAM. Instead, I opted for 16GB RAM in my Laptop, which allows me to run VirtualBox/VMWare Workstation with ease. Power Consumption is pretty good too!