Cheap Home ESXi, XenServer or Hyper-V Server – Part 1

Today I played with my ESXi and recognized again that my server is definitely to slow to old and stops me from doing what I like to do. It is an old Dell PowerEdge SC1430 with just 2GB Ram.

I started to google around what solutions other people already created and I found a nice blog from a guy called Derek, he gave me some ideas. As well I checked the popular German magazine C’t for the last mainboard test to get an idea about the actual chipsets and technology. In the C’t 10/2011 I found a nice test and I started to check the compatibility with VMWare and other hypervisor. A few hours laters with googeling talking to one of my best friends I decided to buy the following:

Mainboard: Intel DQ67OWB3 ~ 100€
– Newest Socket 1155
– Powerful newest Intel chipset with graphic on-board
– AMT 7.0 for remote access even the OS is down save me a KVM-over-IP device
– Found a lot of people who used that board with VMWare and XenServer
– It’s Intel 🙂
– microATX
– Six SATA Ports

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600 Box ~ 230€
– Very Fast
– Hyper-Threading (sadly the Core-i5 with 1155 socket don’t have HT)
– vPro for AMT
– If you like to safe money buy a Core-i5 it’s save 80€

Ram: 16GB-Kit G.Skill RipJaws PC3-10667U CL9 ~ 100€
– Cheap and does what it does
– Very popular

Case: Aerocool Qs-202 Midi-Tower ~ 50€
– microATX
– Up to six 3,5 HDDs
– Cheap
– Nice tests available e.g. au-ja.de

Power: be quiet! Power supply 350W ~ 50€
– Cheap
– Quiet
– Save power
– Very popular

I already have hard disks and DVD drive around. The only thing which I may need is an additional NIC because some users reports the chipset is not working, other reporting works fine. As well I need a professional raid controller because ESXi does not work together with the cheap on board raid controllers. At the moment I am unsure which hypervisor I will use, because maybe I don’t need any extra hardware with XenServer or Hyper-V. XenServer support software raids and the Windows drivers will support the cheap raid controller and Windows as well support software raids. Similar to the NIC I think, lets see.

I will give you an update later when I build all together, please leave comments for feedback.

Update:
The power supply could’t deliver in time so I decided to go to a different as well with a bit more power.

Power: be quiet! Pure Power 430W ATX 2.3 (L7-430W/BN105) ~ 55€
– Cheap
– Quiet
– Save power
– Very popular