Will an i5 be enough for a home lab setup?

I am looking to build a home lab for VMware, but I only have an i5 (Lynnfield) CPU. To reduce costs I am going to be virtualizing the ESXi hosts (how Inception like

), vCenter, and the another VM for the shared storage. I'll most likely be using freeNAS for the shared storage, unless anyone knows of a better option. I am going to need a total of 7 CPUs:

1 for the physical system
4 for the ESXi hosts (2 CPUs each)
1 for vCenter
1 for the shared storage

So would I be able to do this setup only using an i5? Or should I upgrade to an i7?

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Comments

kj0

i5 will be good, if you have 4 cores.

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tstrip007

I'm using an i3 for my home lab without issues. I did run into issues with RAM (6gigs wasnt enough, went up 16). FreeNAS is an NFS option, if you want to go iSCSI, microsoft has a free iSCSI target, Starwind has a free iSCSI san software... just to name a few

cyberguypr

I wouldn't worry much about CPU. Most likely it will be underutilized. You'll be best served by focusing on getting as much RAM as you can plus good storage (SSD, Synology, etc.)

Haswell

Thanks everyone! I've got 16GB of RAM and i5 CPU at 2.8 GHz.

Essendon

That'll easily do! I used to get by with a Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM and 2 SATA disks.

For good performance, follow the other suggestions.

JBrown

I would suggest to go with MS iscsi target. FreeNAS/OpenFiler are usually much slower and somewhat complicated to setup than Microsoft iSCSI Target.

gorebrush

Ha back in the very early day's (2005) I got by with a Single core rig and 2GB of RAM

As commented above, CPU won't make a great deal of difference - if you are just labbing things then the majority of the time those VM's will probably be sat there doing nothing.

However, you will need those giggidybytes of RAM..........

Haswell

Thanks again everyone! I am really glad that I have 16GB of RAM.

I'll look into Microsoft iSCSI Target.

datgirl

Haswell wrote: »

Thanks everyone! I've got 16GB of RAM and i5 CPU at 2.8 GHz.

I would say that it is more than adequate for the host, and even Server guests. However, if you wanted to run a production and non test / lab environment, I would bump up the RAM, and possibly the CPU, but for a home lab you will be fine.