ESX 3.5 Quad Core Suggestions

[zacktx]

Hello Everyone -- I was wondering if some of you with more experience can help me out here.. i'm trying to build a lab at home with 4 ESX Servers, with 8GB RAM each. I am having trouble selecting a motherboard.. i've been looking on the HCL and the whitebox list stil cannot find one that would work for me.

here is the scenario

I have a openfiler server with 2TB drives running iSCSI , i think i should be able to keep the VMs here.. thinking of adding gigabit NICs to this box.

I need to load ESX 3.5 on 4 boxes, the motherboard needs to support atleast 8GB RAM and have a onboard VGA card, also I think I should just need the local harddrive to load ESX 3.5 on. IS that correct or am i missing something here?

Can someone suggest a board that would meet my requirements here? i'm ok with having to buy NIC cards if needed.. but need a board on which the SATA controller with work with ESX and ESXi

I would like run INTEL Core 2 Quad processors, but if you can suggest a board for the AMD PHENOM QUAD PROCs that would work to.

[NTurnbull]

Hi, welcome to the forums. I must say thats a fairly big lab environment for home! If you dont mind me asking, what are you thinking of running?

If you've got your heart and wallet set on 4 physical hosts with that spec then run a search on the community forums for 'whitebox' and you'll find loads of info on workable (but not supported!) boards, SATA controllers etc... The other option is getting a couple of physical boxes and run VMware workstation on them with ESX running under Workstation as vm's.

Thanks,

Neil

[zacktx]

mostly citrix , the VMs will run multple domains for multiple clients etc i;ve looked throught alot of the list(s) but can't find a board... i was thinking of ordering PCs from www.ecollepepc.com seems like good prices on the custom section... can you suggest a board he's got listed on the website ??

[Jasemccarty]

Checkout Dave's site: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm

You'll find a list of configurations that others have had success with.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach