VMware Whitebox Build
A while back I talked about building a VMware whitebox to run VMware ESX on inexpensive equipment. That was over a year ago and a few things have changed, so I figured an update was in order.
For the whitebox build I purchased a new motherboard, processor, and memory. This was based on the requirements that at the time ESX required a SAS chipset on the whitebox motherboard. Over the past year ESX’s support of SATA chipsets has improved, so you may be able to save some money on the motherboard. Below is a complete list of the hardware used in my build.
- Enclosure: Lian Li PC-V6000B ATX Mid Tower
- Processor: Intel Xenon X3230 Kentsfield (Quad Core)
- Motherboard: Asus P5BV-E/SAS
- Memory: 4 x Wintec AMPX 2GB DDR2-800
- Storage: Western Digital Caviar WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA-II
- Hard drive Enclosure: Athena Power BP-SATA3051B 5-bay hot-swap SATA backplane
- Power Supply: Enermax Noisetaker II EG425P-VE 420W
- Enclosure: Lian Li PC-V6000B ATX Mid-Tower
As you can probably tell, this used to be a file server that I built but decommissioned when a motherboard failure also took my data with it. One 500GB hard drive has been sufficient for both the ESXi installation and the storage of the all of the virtual machines (thin provisioning works very well).
Initially I installed Ubuntu 64-bit as the host operating system, with VMware Server running on top of that. Additionally I used GNS3 on the host to connect back to my lab equipment via the second NIC. Since then, VMware has made ESX (ESXi) freely available. I decided to install VMware ESXi 4.0 in place of the host OS, so that ESX can better manage allocation of the physical resources to each VM.
So far everything has been working out well. I have configured another Vswitch which connects to the second physical NIC and will be used to connect the VMs to the lab equipment. In the coming weeks, I will be creating a Linux VM and installing Dynagen to handle virtualization of some Cisco routers.
