ESXi Server


“think there is a world market for maybe five computers. .” 
 - IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943
“Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons..” 
 - Popular Mechanics, 1949


I think in this day and age any developer worth his salt has some virtual servers laying around, be it in the cloud, on a dedicated server, or on their own dev machine.  I find having an dedicated box at home dedicated to running virtual servers to be a big help.  Sometimes in running a few real servers I need, but mostly as a nice test platform for me to play and experiment in.

I currently have a physical server in my room that has VMWars ESXi 5.0 installed on it, below are the specs.

Software

  •     ESXI 6.5.0
Hardware


Motherboard
Gigabyte  GA-EP45-DS3L







CPU
Intel Quad Core L3360 @ 2.83 GHz 

According to CPU Benchmark it has an Avg CPU Mark of 4145  


Memory 

16 GiB total

2x DDR2-800  4GiB   G. Skill
2x DDR2-800  4GiB   G. Skill



Hard Drives
10.0 TiB Total

3.0 TiB  Western Digital  WD20EADS
4.0 TiB  Western Digital  WD40EZRX
3.0 TiB  Western Digital  WD30EFRX





Video Card
MSI N210-MD512H

http://us.msi.com/product/vga/N210MD512H.html#hero-overview

I bough this for because its fanless





Here are a few actual pictures of my system







I hope to replace this system within the next 8 months.  I want to go quieter, lower power needs, and higher redundancy.   I am hoping to go all fanless or nearly all fanless.  Bump up to ESXi 6.0,  32 or 64 GiB, an LSI raid card to support a raid 5 system.  Anyone out there have an ESXi 6.0 whitebox at home with raid? (if so send me some recommendations on raid cards I should use)