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I know this has probably been asked before. What is a good reasonably priced server for an ESXi 5.5 lab? I would be nesting, and can also run a few VM’s on my desktop

I was looking at Dell C1100’s, most of them on ebay have 72GB of RAM for like $500ish. I think this server is only compatible with ESXi 5.1 and not 5.5 though. I could buy a RAID card for this one if needed, bonus for this server is lower power consumption.

Or a Dell Poweredge 2950 III, works with 5.5 I believe

@HP @Dell_Technologies

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I have a PE 2950 (still running 5.0 though) … and I couldn’t complain in the least… although I won’t comment on whether 5.5 would be the same (because I am not sure myself).

IIRC mine has 2 dual-core XEONS and 16GB RAM with 6x1TB SATA drives in OBR10 for storage. While a little lacking in RAM for more resource intensive servers, it hosts my DC/Mail/Web/File server for my home/personal domain, without an issue.

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It really depends on what you want to run on it, personally I would avoid nesting, it overcomplicates things,

I have ran a few HP Microservers each with 16GB ram, but for something more pokey the ML110/ML115 are a good start.

I currently have 2 ML310e Gen 8’s which are a plenty enough for my needs, 32GB ram and quad core Xeons.

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ThinkServer TS140 is one to look at. The HP ML110G7 used to have similar specs and price point, but the Gen 8 gear is much more expensive.

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FWIW both Microserver and the ML310’s run 5.5 fine

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I just built my own using a Supermicro MB, 3.0 GHz Intel Core i5, 32 GB Kingston RAM, and Seagate HDDs. ESXi 5.5 runs great. Cost: $700-ish

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Just be careful on getting some of the older dell servers like the 2950 or others. They suck a lot of power. A friend of mine did that, had a couple of them to learn clustering and other things. Power bill came and it was something like > $700 cause he had them running 24/7. Just something to keep in mind

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Where are you at? I have some 2950s i just pulled out of production i need to get rid of

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IL, 10 mins east of STL, MO

as far as what I plan to run, WHS2011 for client backups/media streaming/plex. DC, Win7/Win8 test VM’s, few linux VM’s etc. Was thinking of running the vCenter appliance and nest a few ESXi hosts for learning more about VMware, 2012R2 Starwind VM to use as an iSCSI target etc etc.

I could also just add 16gb to my desktop to bring it up to 32GB of RAM and use VMware Workstation to play with. I’d just rather have an actual server that I can virtualize my current ‘server’ which is the WHS2011 running on a Dell Studio 540 2x1TB drives in a drive pool

I’m so indecisive lol… as far as power usage with the 2950 III’s, I would only run one but I’m sure it would still suck up a lot of power.

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Also see DL 380 G5’s reasonably priced as well

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Those aren’t on the HCL, but I read that 5.5 will run on them. Prices are pretty good on ebay for 32GB RAM setups… hmm, thoughts on those HP servers?

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HP MicroServer if it has to be cheap

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9435299&CatId=3368

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Doesn’t have to be super cheap, I mean I could probably fork out 450-500ish since income tax time is approaching. I figure if I could pick up a cheap used server with 32GB+ of RAM, I would go that route

I just think the microserver wouldn’t have enough grunt. My PC with 16GB RAM, AMD 8350 CPU reaches the 14-15GB usage running 1 vcenter appliance, 2 esxi hosts, 1 2012 DC, 1 2012 Starwind, and 1 win8 VM. So I’m looking for something that can run that comfortably. Plus my ‘production’ WHS machine and whatever else I decide to run.

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HP DL380G6s are getting quite cheap on ebay.
I would get the 6, the 5 (that I have) are a good deal more noisy.
Something like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROLIANT-DL380-G6-8B-INTEL-XEON-QUAD-CORE-E5506-16GB-NO-HDD-/111465770082?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19f3e0ac62

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-2-5-SAS-SATA-Hard-Drive-HDD-Caddy-Tray-DL360-DL380-G5-G6-DL385-DL585-G2-G7-/151520883076?pt=UK_Computing_Servers&hash=item2347593184

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+1 for the DL380s did similar for my 1st big lab with a pair of G4’s and an openfiler san.

However personally ive cut that right back and went with a workstation. (due to new house I without the same level of soundproofing in the cupboard) Ive got a pair of Dell T5400’s with Dual Xeons and stacked with as much memory as I could stuff into them. Only using one for ESX atm the others acting as a Physical server… for now. I may have also carved up the case a little to fit a 3x3.5 bay to give a decent bit of storage on both of them. All in i think i spent just over £1000 for the pair including the extra storage about 2 years ago so newer models with better processors are probably available

Ebay for Dell T5400 dual xeon 32gig

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Thanks for reference! Indeed we maybe a value but with a free Hyper-Converged setup. In this case we’ll allow to save on a dedicated storage box (who wants to pay for something could be skipped?) and still have a fault-tolerance config (not really a benefit for a lab unless to learn how things should be done). More info here:

StarWind Virtual SAN Free

Wrapped up info on Free Vs. Paid is here:

Free Vs. Paid

Good luck and happy clustering :slight_smile:

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I just picked up a PowerEdge R900 off ebay and it was pretty loaded for what I needed. Add some drives and your ready to rock!

Ive bought from the seller before and they have good hardware.

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I have put vSphere Hypervisor 5.5.0 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 (don’t recall which gen) for testing a virtual machine. It ran just fine.

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Have you had a look at HP Mini servers?

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Yea but those won’t provide enough grunt to handle a decent amount of VM’s. But it appears my tax return should be much more than I anticipated. So after I take care of a few priorities, I’m going to search for something with lots of RAM and decent amount of storage. I will research everything you guys mention here and go from there, going to start looking now I guess