What’s a Whitebox?
The bottom part of my network rack has been occupied with two servers for a while. At the time that I purchased the servers, I thought they would be a great and would be put to use on a regular basis. Soon after I grew tired of dealing with them. My Dell server was a full length server, which made it hard to get to the connections in the back. Both servers were very loud, and they consumed too much power.
Recently the Dell poweredge was sold, and I’m still waiting to unload the Sun Netra X1. My plan is to replace the servers with a VMware ESX server whitebox.
The term whitebox refers to a computer or server that has hardware that may not be listed on the official VMware hardware list. Building a VMware whitebox is not only cheaper, but it is also more practical for a home setting where you don’t want a huge server keeping you up at night (let alone driving your power bill through the roof).
Based on the official VMware hardware list, we can find out what network chipsets, SAS chipsets, etc are supported by the VMware kernel. This sounds like an easy task, but this information is sometimes difficult to find. On top of that, you have to be very careful about the hardware you choose, since the VMware kernel is notoriously picky about the hardware it will recognize
My ultimate goal is to build a whitebox for under $1,000 that has the ability to run 7-8 virtual servers with ease.
