I am a Turtle doing Virtualization. Help me cross the road.

joemc3

I have the books for study with a lot of labs. I need help filling out the rest of my home server.
I have $400 to spend and I already have an Intel I-5 2400.
I am not sure if I can use the optiplex 790 Dell case.

I want to go Micro and I will be going 32 gigs of ram from the get go. I have absolutely 0 experience with Windows server and the suite of Vmware solutions.

I think I need to install windows server 2012R2 and Esxi on my server and the desktop vware on my personal pc. Does this sound about right?

Can I get away with non ECC ram? I have a WD 1tb black HD. Is it better to get a lower power consumption HD? I will be powering down the server at night.

Essendon

- 32GB RAM sounds good.
- No one way to go about a lab. Some people go with a nested ESXi setup (like me, check my blog), others go with VMware Workstation. Both setups are great. Tons of threads on here, a Google search should yield plenty of advice.
- Get an SSD or two. Maybe, one to begin with and add another later if needed. Install the OS on the SATA disk and the VMs on the SSD.
- The processor you have, does it support VT-x? I think it does, wouldnt hurt to check.
- You can get away with non ECC RAM.

ehnde

I don't know about the ECC ram. Read your motherboard manual. If you can't find it, just google your mother board + the word "manual".

1HD won't make a big difference, but SSDs are the lowest power consuming drives and also very nice for a vmware lab.

It sounds like you're going to put windows server on that server. Do I have this wrong? Surely you'll install ESXi and windows server as a VM, right?