Mike D’s Blog

As I have mentioned before in previous posts on this blog and comments on other blogs I really haven’t seen many issues installing VMware ESXi on various hardware platforms as others have seen out there. Maybe I got lucky when I went and picked out my inexpensive hardware for the lab. Who knows. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my configuration so here it is in detail. Note: This is what I used to put together the lab I run at the house. This may or may not be what you want for production. I’m sure everyone knows all the caveats around support and such when you build your own servers. With that out of the way here’s the specs.

All parts below were acquired from Fry’s Electronics. If you don’t have a Fry’s near you then (a) you’re missing out big time and (b) you can probably get these same parts on the web or at another computer parts store.

I started off with a cheap case. Nothing special. It was a full size PC case that listed for $25 but I actually got for free through a rebate.

Next up was a Power Supply. Again, nothing special. I found a nice 500W power supply for $15 (free after rebate).

Next was the motherboard. I opted for an “all-in-one” board that had built-in SATA controllers, RAID, Gigabit networking, and plenty of memory slots. After comparing the prices I opted for the ASUS K8N-E Deluxe. That ran me $131.40. I didn’t check the HCL for ESXi before I bought this (since ESXi wasn’t out at the time) but it runs just great on the box.

Next was the processor. I didn’t really care about speed at the time since it was just a lab and I wasn’t going to do any benchmarks. I did want the processor to be dual core and I wanted it to have virtualization technology built-in. Based on that and price and the motherboard I chose I went for the AMD Sempron 3800+. That set me back only $49.

Next up was memory. Not much chose here. I wanted to put the max 3 GB in the system but I actually 2 GB in this particular build up. That set me back $200 (RAM was expensive when I put this thing together a while back). Nothing special about the memory. I just bought the cheapest memory I could find that fit the system.

For storage I dropped a single 250 GB SATA drive into the system. I was planning on attaching this to a homemade SAN so internal storage didn’t bother me too much. I’ve actually since converted to no internal storage since I’m PXE booting the hosts anyways. At any rate, the storage set me back another $90 at the time.

Last was an additional NIC. The motherboard has a single 10/100/1000 NIC built-in which works great. I decided to add another dual-port Intel e1000 NIC to the box. That cost me another $35 (they had a sale).

Here’s the grand total:

Case – $25 (free after rebate)

Power Supply – $15 (free after rebate)

Motherboard – $131.40

Processor – $49

Memory – $200

Hard Drive – $90

Extra 10/100/1000 NIC – $35

TOTAL = $545.40 ($505.40 after rebate)

Oh yeah, I forgot the most important piece – ESXi. It’s FREE so it doesn’t add any cost. Go here to get a copy now!

So there you go – an ESXi host for $500. This runs like a champ after everything is installed as you can see below. If anyone else out there has some good, cheap ways to build an ESXi host let me know. I’m sure a lot of people would be interested.

Tags: VMware