Hello everyone,

I am preparing the specifications for a new ESXi 5 whitebox for my small office. We are a web development company so we need a few servers.

We are running between 20 to 30 VM in it. It is a complete mix of Windows and Linux systems, with also one or two OS X machines.

Since CPUs evolve so quickly, I wanted to get your opinions guys on the "budget" box I'm preparing, if you don't mind. Also, I have added fans and PSU specs as noise (or lack thereof) is also important for us:

Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTL-i
Processors : 2x Xeon E5645 (6x2.40Ghz)
Memory: 4x Kingston ValueRam 8GB DDR3 1333 ECC Registered
System HD: 1x Corsair Force 3 Series 60GB SSD SATAIII
Datastore: 6x Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB SATAIII, RAID 5
Raid: 1x LSI MegaRaid 9240-8i
Network: OnBoard dual Gigabit Intel Ethernet
Case: Fractal Design Define XL
CPU Coolers: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro
Power Supply: Corsair AX850
Fans : Scythe Karma Flow, Noctua NF-S12B FLX, Silverstone SST-FN181

What do you guys think? Would this be sufficient for our needs? From what I have found, all components are natively supported by ESXi 4.1 already, so I have no doubt it will also work with ESXi 5.

Thanks,
DLR

It looks good. A few points -

1) if you wait for ESXi 5, it'll support RAID arrays (LUNs) larger that 2 TB. ESXi 4.x only supports LUNs up to 2 TB

2) How much memory do you plan to allocate to the VMs? ESXi 5 will have a 32 GB limit (which you'll have for physical memory) but the limit may also extend to VMs. I.e. you wouldn't be able to over commit memory (to go over 32 GB) to your VMs.

3) ESXi has pretty low I/O requirements for the system disk. You won't put a lot of load on a SSD disk so you could go with a USB device instead.

4) If disk performance is a priority, make sure to get the controller with battery backed write cache.

Hey Dave,

Thanks for your much appreciated comments.

1/ That was my intention: this is essentially an ESXi 5 box. The datastore will be a 15TB RAID5 array, as we plan to run our filer on it too.

2/ Most VMs have between 512MB and 2GB of RAM, so plenty to go from there.

3/ I wanted to take advantage of ESXi 5 Host Cache. Hence, a SATA III SSD going to more than 500MB/s should help things out.

4/ Thanks for the recommendation. The box will be on a UPS, would it still need a battery backed write cache?

Again, thanks a lot for your comments. Much appreciated.

Hi Dave, i'v just install my new ESXi WHitebox,

i have 4 Network Cards

3' Realtek 8168 ( recognized directly)
1' D-Link PCi ( Realtek 8169 ) ( not recognized even the driver include ) ;-(

I need to edit the R8169.map file , but i don't know where to put it to be taken at reboot ...

can you help me please ...

Thanks.

Karim.

With BBWC performance is much better. ESXi doesn't cache any write data so if you don't have BBWC it'll be noticable slower.

One thing to note - although ESXi supports large datastores, virtual disks are still limited to 2 TB.

I've noticed with the LSI 9260-8i, I can force the write cache to on, even without a battery backup installed. Yes, I have a UPS, and I realize this may not be a good idea to run this way, but I'm still in the testing phase.

More info here:
http://tinkertry.com/goodraidcontroller ... esxsupport
http://tinkertry.com/vzilla
http://tinkertry.com/vmdirectpath