We’ve been running VMWare Server 2.0 on top of a CentOS box for a while now but it could not really cope, especially as we are limited to 32bit CentOS for other application reasons which always meant upgrading the hardware was mostly pointless.
This finally got to breaking point over the summer so we started planning an upgrade. The release of ESX4i as a free version was a deciding factor although we did evaluate both VirtualBox and XenServer. The biggest problem in leaving the Linux based VMWare Server to a bare metal hypervisor is that you don’t have the luxury of broad hardware support.
After trawling VMWare hardware compatibility list and having only a budget of £2000 we came up with the following:
- Intel SR1600UR (comes with 2 socket with Tylersburg 5520 motherboard)
- Intel E5520 Xeon Nehalem (no heatsink/thermal solution)
- Adaptec SR5405 Unified SAS/SATA Raid controller + ABM-800 battery unit
- 2 x Corsair xms3 6GB Ram kit (TR3X6G1333C7)
- 3 x Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 hard disk
- Samsung slimline DVD drive
I could have bought an ESX pre-certified system from Dell for not much of a premium if I had the patience for a special offer to come around but I was not overly keen on buying their drives and RAM. What really made up my mind however was that the Intel box comes with zero CPUs but 2 heatsinks. Dell charges an outrageous premium for a CPU upgrade with heatsink whereas with the Intel I can buy an second Xeon from anyone at well under half the Dell price.
The final shopping list totalled around £1500 so was under budget and we will get a unit with 8 hyperthreaded cores (upgradable to 16), 12GB of RAM (upgradable to 24) and 2.7TB of storage. Hours of painstaking research said this would work so it’s ordered.
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