Home ESXi Lab
My Home lab [vSphere ESXi 6.x Server]
VMware ESXi 6.5 Server:
- Lenovo D20 Workstation 4155F1U
- Intel Xeon E5649 @ 2.533GHz
- 48GB RAM ECC DDR3 PC3-10600R 1333MHz
- 1.16TB Storage on a Dell Perc 6/i
- 5x 640GB HDD in RAID 10+Hot Spare
- 2x Broadcom NetXtreme BCM575x Gigabit Ports
- Nvidia Quadro FX 4000
My home ESXi server running ESXi 6.5. It is currently running on a Lenovo D20 workstation with 48GB of RAM, a single Xeon E5649 and a RAID 10+HS of 640GB drives on a Perc 6/i controller providing 1.16TB.
I originally got the workstation for $400 off eBay (really good buy, most were going for $800+). For RAID I simply reused a Dell Perc 6/i out of a PowerEdge 2950 I had originally gotten that proved to be way too loud to use. For the most part it worked fine but I had to tape off the SMBus pins otherwise the system would still boot but not register more than 8-16GB of the 24GB of RAM at the time. Two small strips of electrical tape with enough extra to pull them out of the slot if they got stuck works fine. I bought 4 extra 640GB drives to to make the 5 drive RAID 10+HS with a cold spare for replacement. Since then I have recently upgraded the RAM to 48GB and switched out the E5607 for a E5649.
In the future I hope to add in another CPU, max out the RAM to the full 96GB with 2 CPU’s and upgrade the RAID to a 6-8 drive RAID 10 of 2.5″ drives with a SSD for vFlash. That is, if I continue to use it. I would really like to build out and run a 3 host cluster. For now, it should last me for a few years as is.
Spiceworks Project: Home Server [ESXi 6.x]
ESXi .vibs for Perc 6/i [Mega]
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