VMware Whiteboxen

I've been in denial for a while, but the time finally came to shell out some cash on faster servers for my home testlab. It currently exists as a mess of old desktops, and even older Compaq servers (before hp rebranded them).

While everything has keeping up with what I need it to do, I really want to start spending more time working with virtualisation technologies and bringing myself up to speed again with some of the later MS technology (server 2008/sql 2008/etc) and the fact is that 4-8 year old hardware just can't cut it any more.

I've been running Xen for many years now with great success but I really wanted chance to start testing other hypervisors such as VMware's, and to test some of the newer MS products in VMs. Windows VMs of course require hardware assistance, so my older hardware won't do (even slowly), regardless of the hypervisor used (with the possible exception of qemu, which isn't technically a hypervisor anyway).

Real Servers or whiteboxes again?

I had a quick look into the pricing and options for buying a cheap commercial server, from the likes of Dell having had good success with my last purchase of an entry level IBM x226 as my file server. The big killer when it comes to servers is the RAM pricing. VM hosts need lots of RAM and I wanted a minimum of 8GB per server. ECC RAM is not cheap and that's the only kind you can get even with entry level servers so having reviewed the options I ended up going down the DIY/whitebox path.

A friend from work builds PCs all the time and he was helpful enough to suggest a base config which I just tweaked a bit to come out with my final component list.

The final configuration was 2:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83Ghz CPU
XFX MG-N780-ISH9 motherboard
Coolermaster Elite 330 Black Case
Lite-on 20A4P PATA DVD Burner
Corsair XMS2 DDR2 1066MHz 2GB RAM pair (x2)
Silverstone Olympia OP700 700W Power Supply
ASUS 8400GS silent video card

The CPU was the fastest I could find readily, though I think there is a 3Ghz version out there somewhere.The motherboard is very much a gaming motherboard, in fact it's triple SLI. Obviously the video prowess wasn't the goal, but given that it's built for high throughput and overclocking it will mean that it's a very stable board. The powersupply is bigger than I need which should add to the reliability, and the case was pretty much the cheapest one I could find.
The video card and DVD burners will probably be repurposed and shuffled at a later time, but to get things started I needed both to initially build the system. I have plans to use one of the video cards in my HTPC for h264 decoding as covered here. I'm actually using the exact same card they used to be sure that it will work :)
I went for 8GB of RAM, which is actually the maximum that these motherboards support anyway. I also opted to buy the faster DDR1066 versions for some possible overclocking and some extra margin above DDR800.

With everything "overspeced", they should be very reliable.

I haven't included any hard drives as initially I'll be running ESXi, and attempting to use it from a USB key. I purchased a pair of "high speed" 4GB usb keys for this.

File Server RAM

Finally I also ordered another 4GB of RAM for my file server. It's been humbly chugging along with 1GB serving up nfs/cifs while also running 4 zones, but once I start throwing VM traffic at it too (iscsi/nfs) it won't have the RAM to cache anything and the performance is going to suffer big time. Being a server, I had to pay way too much for the ECC RAM. I did find some Kingston aftermarket DIMMS that are gauranteed to work rather than the stupidly priced IBM OEM RAM. The documentation on the RAM configuration for the x226 is very confusing so I still don't actually know if I'll be able to use my current pair of 512MB DIMMs in conjunction with the 2x2GB DIMMs that I've ordered. Worst case, I'll have 4GB of RAM, best case, 5GB. I can live with that.

Hardware delivery

While most of my new "server" hardware arrived before christmas, the CPUs were on backorder; especially frustrating as they WERE in stock when I placed my order so that I could work on this over the holidays.
This mean that I couldn't actually start on anything until the 29th December.
It turns out that my server RAM has been delayed too, which is annoying but I can start testing everything with only 1GB.