ESXI Whitebox

Hi forumers

im new here and need some advice (try to googled around but cant seem to find it). im ordering a DIY PC with 32gb ram fitted to cater for my studies (MCSA 2012 and VCP). question is, do i need the following hardware:

1) CPU cooler
2) Graphic Card
3) a high voltage PSU

your input is appreciated. Thanks

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cs8400

1) CPU cooler - No. Stock is fine
2) Graphic Card - No. On-board will be sufficient.
3) a high voltage PSU - No. 500W would be plenty for most boxes.

I would invest in a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a decent capacity/speed SSD for a whitebox.

jibbajabba

Yea - as cheap as you can get away with, throw your cash at CPU / RAM and SSDs ... Heck even CPU can be cheap as long as it is on the HCL but you will run out of RAM and IOPS quickly ...

gorebrush

As much RAM and SSD as you can afford.

Any old CPU will do, though I went for an i5-4570S (low power) as my ESXi box is on 24/7 running some production VM's as well as my various labbing activities. More cores the better though, but don't fall for the trap I did and buy the AMD 8-core thing, it burns 125W at full power, though, 8 cores was nice. All about your use case.

lsud00d

Before you order the separate parts to build a whitebox, checkout Dell (5500/7500 series) or HP (ZX00 series) desktop workstations. They are built super beefy (dual quad-core xeons and 96GB RAM anybody?!) and if you check on eBay chances are you can get one with better specs at a cheaper price than a whitebox you would build out.

DoubleNNs

Funny.. I've been thinking about building my own lab server and was thinking about the AMD A8.

AMD A8-7600 Kaveri Quad-Core 3.1GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket FM2+ 65W Desktop Processor Radeon R7 series AD7600YBJABOX - Newegg.com
Above link shows it at 65W tho.

Souljacker

The 8 core he's talking about is likely the 83xx series which does run at a whopping 125w. The 4350 does as well - my replacement for my old PhenomII and boy does it scream... But you pay for it as it nearly melts your legs off under the desk. I'm pretty sure all the Vishera cores pull 125w, and they are the last in line of the "true" cpus that AMD is making. Now we are all APU, which is what you linked.

Deathmage

I will contest to more memory.

Both of my R610's have 32 GB's of RAM each and I'm even wanting more memory..... once you start labbing with FT and HA double of everything starts coming into play.... it's good practice so you don't make that bad decision in a production world....

DoubleNNs

Souljacker wrote: »

and they are the last in line of the "true" cpus that AMD is making. Now we are all APU, which is what you linked.

Not to derail the thread, but could you explain the difference?

TechGuru80

lsud00d wrote: »

Before you order the separate parts to build a whitebox, checkout Dell (5500/7500 series) or HP (ZX00 series) desktop workstations. They are built super beefy (dual quad-core xeons and 96GB RAM anybody?!) and if you check on eBay chances are you can get one with better specs at a cheaper price than a whitebox you would build out.

I actually just picked up one from the advice of another thread here. 2x processors, 72gb ram...picked up a 1tb ssdh and a 500gb ssd.

lsud00d

Awesome TechGuru80! I am looking at buying one soon...waiting for the right box with 72-96GB RAM, and of course 2 quad-core xeons, because what not?

Will slap in other disks like you did as well.

kriscamaro68

lsud00d wrote: »

Awesome TechGuru80! I am looking at buying one soon...waiting for the right box with 72

Why not something like this:
Dell PowerEdge C6100 XS23 TY3 24B 8 x L5630 96GB No HDD | eBay

or

Dell PowerEdge C1100 CS24 Ty 1U 2X Xeon QC L5520 2 26GHz 4XTRAYS 72GB DDR3 | eBay

TechGuru80

Dell Precision T5500 Workstation 2X Six Core L5640 2 26GHz 72GB RAM 80GB SATA | eBay

If you don't want a rack server.

lsud00d

TechGuru80 wrote: »

Dell Precision T5500 Workstation 2X Six Core L5640 2 26GHz 72GB RAM 80GB SATA | eBay

If you don't want a rack server.

Pulled the trigger on this one...now waiting for Black Friday to pick up some drives. I want to get a good 512GB SSD and think there will be some available in the $140-170 range, and 1 or 2TB HDD's should be fairly cheap as well.