What about building a ESXi 5.x server?

Recently, I’ve been looking at VMware to determine what it would take to run my little ‘datacenter’ using ESXi. I experimented a while with running ESXi 5.5 on my laptop and desktop, booting from a USB Stick, setting up iSCSI for the VM datastore, configuring VMDirectPath I/O pass-through (of a firewire PCI card for my DVB tuners) and moving some of my current Hyper-V virtual machines to ESXi.

But what hardware should I choose? Go for another build using consumer components or go for server hardware? I always thought that it would cost a fortune to use server components, but only the motherboard is a bit more expensive.

The current system has 16GB of RAM and with the 13 virtual machine that I’ve put on there, not much room to spare. In the new system I will double it to 32GB.

I always take the most recent technology for my builds, so I’ll be looking for a ‘Haswell’ intel Xeon processor.

The motherboard has to support ECC RAM and the ability to have four PCIe 1GB NICs and room for the PCIe firewire card (for the DVB tuners).

The server does not really have to get any hard drives (I will boot it from a USB stick) and the VM datastore will be located on another machine, but I decided to get some drives for it anyway. Building this new host with the same functionality as the current system will take some time and both systems will run in parallel for a while. I will convert my current server into a file server running FreeNAS later and the new server also has to run independently while building the FreeNAS system. I can re-use the hard drives in the ESXi host as backup for the VM datastore and the other data that needs to be backed-up from the NAS.

Yesterday, I ordered the following components for the new ESXi system:

	Description	Vendor	Price (euros)
Case	Lian-Li PC-V335 (uATX)	Max ICT	102,17
Motherboard	Supermicro X10SLL-F	Max ICT	159,26
CPU	Intel Xeon E3-1230v3	Max ICT	227,42
CPU Cooler	Noctua NH-L9i	Azerty	36,91
Memory	4x 8GB Kingston ValueRam KVR16E11/8i	Max ICT	329,46
Power supply	Be Quiet System Power 7 300W	Max ICT	33,92
HDD - intern	2x Western Digital RED WD30EFRX – 3TB	Azerty	239,80
NIC	2x Intel Pro 1000PT Dual Port 1Gbit	eBay	88,00
USB Stick	2x Bestmedia Platinum Slider	Azerty	15,70
Cat 5e Patch	2x C2G Cat 5e patch cable 2m	Azerty	7,76
Cat 5e Cross	2x C2G Cat 5e crossover cable 2m	Azerty	15,36

Remarks:

·        The supermicro board contains two 1 Gbit NICs and I will add one of the Dual port NICs. I will put the other one in the existing system (the future NAS) to create a multipath iSCSI connection between the two systems.