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Ideal home VMWare Server?

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by seonix 1 view

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I'm looking for suggestions for home "test lab" server to run ESX on. I was thinking possibly a HP Proilant micro. I certainly open to the idea of building something, as I have before, but I'm looking for something cheap(er) that will run about 3 servers (Win 2008, Red hat) in a virtual environment.
Has anyone had any experience with the HP proliant micro's?

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by oh smeg

Will be able to run these OS's as they need to be 64 Bit with the majority of the Mentioned OS's the reality is that most Domestic Desktop type units will not be powerful enough to do a good enough job.

Here it all depends on what you want to do a Bit of Testing would be OK but any hard core server work just wouldn't be suitable on hardware like that.

Col

by larbakium

You mentioned that all the environement will be a test lab..
If you have no intentions to migration to a production environment in the future I suppose and to host 3 vms.... it will very much depend on the VMs requirements.

What I mean is that, if you need 3 vms with 3 OS that will only run couple of application that do not require alot of RAM or processing than a small server or even a desktop box will do the job and keep you on a low budget..

If you want to setup a high availability environment and add services and/OS that will require a higher workload than you might look at a server box...

by robo_dev

There are two 'gotchas' to look for: disk-controller and processor.

Whitebox HCL:
http://www.vm-help.com/index.html

If you have a 64bit processor with VT, you can run VMware 4x (or 5).

A 32 bit processor (OR a 64 bit without VT) can run VMware 3.x.

VT = Virtualization Technology
I was disappointed as I have a Dell PC that has an Intel DuoCore 64bit processor that DOES NOT have VT, therefore it can run VMware 3.5, not version 4 (or 5).

Note too that some SATA-RAID controllers do not work with VMware at all.

If you want to do raid, it won't work with software-only raid (like many Dell PCs)

http://www.vm-help.com//esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php

At home I run ESX3i 3.5 (32 bit) on an ancient Dell Server with 3GHZ CoreDuo processor.

I've got five instances of Windows XP, One Ubuntu 10, one MineOS (Crux UNIX) all run like a champ on 4Gigs of ram (seriously). (though the MineOS can peg the processor at times).

An optimized XP instance will consume maybe 5% of the total processor and maybe 300KB of RAM. Win2008 is about the same, processor wise, but would take more RAM.

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