Cheap Used/Refurbished ESXi 5.1 box

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T10:29:16.000Z

Morning Y’all,

I’m blessed to have some nice Dell servers at work that we run ESXi on, but at home I’m needing to build and ESXi box as my college is adding ESXi to the curriculum next semester. I currently have a white box, but it’s not going to suffice for what I want/need for both this class and other personal labs I’ve been wanting to run for awhile now, my current is a dual core 1.8 with no vt-d support some I’m stuck with 32 bit host images, it unfortuanly only has 4 gigs of ram(maxed) and no raid support, I’ll end up turning this into a NAS box for fun with iSCSI as I have a raid card laying around for the sata drives in it.

Anyways, I’m looking for as CHEAP as possible as I am a college student but something I can run ESXi 5.x on, at least 16 gigs of ram vt-d support, vt-d would be nice but not required per se. I’ll connect to the NAS for storage via iSCSI(more for my own training/practice) so internal drives aren’t required, now granted if I could find local storage built in to the box I wouldn’t be opposed but ram is more importatnt to me than storage. Oh if the server does have a raid card I’d like to be able to use sata drives instead of sas and raid 10, yes I love sas but I’m looking at what my poor butt can afford while in school and working two part time computer jobs.

Thanks in advance and have a blessed day,

Austin

mikedavis · 2013-08-08T10:42:12.000Z

A Dell PowerEdge 2900 could be found on ebay with those specs for about $500-$700. Not sure if that’s “cheap” , but I don’t know where you would find something with RAID for less.

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T10:48:24.000Z

Unfortunately I’m hoping around 300 at the most, I’ve been looking and found some Dell Poweredge 2950 gen II for about 250 on ebay as well as some hp dl360 gen 5 for about 200, these are rocking 16 gig and two 73 gig sas drives, two dual core xeons, I’m leaning more towards the dell currently as it is a two U server and I would think adding network cards and what not would be easier(less cramped) . Are the HP dl360 easy servers to work in? What about the 2950? Am I missing some other server that would be better?

mikedavis · 2013-08-08T10:51:58.000Z

The HP DL360 is a great server to work with. I’m surprised you can find them that cheap, but I guess the Gen 5 is getitng old.

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T10:58:52.000Z

Even though it’s one U it’s not cramped? Our r410 is a real pain.

steveanderson7252 · 2013-08-08T11:00:18.000Z

The Gen 5 May not support all the 5.1 requirements so make sure you have all the compatibility determined before you buy.

danielbrown2775 · 2013-08-08T11:02:53.000Z

I have 2 PE2950 running VMware. Those servers are pretty rock solid. dual power supplies and you can get a PE2950 with 2 processors @ 3 Ghz, 16 GB RAM and 6 SAS drives for around $350 (As of 10 minutes ago on ebay). Buy 2 and you have yourself a good load balancing lesson.

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T11:06:41.000Z

When working on the inside of the 2950 is it enjoyable like it is in our R710?

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T11:07:04.000Z

Does the 2950 offer vt-x and vt-d or just vt-x?

121183 · 2013-08-08T11:12:45.000Z

Look for an HP XW9400 on ebay.

You can take it up to 12 cores and 32gb of ran fairly cheaply and ESXi 5.1 installs on it without any problems using the 4.06 bios.

pbsadmin9562 · 2013-08-08T13:23:34.000Z

For my own Sandbox I’ve used Dell Precisions before (installed esxi 5.1 fine). The larger near server class versions. For example, you could find a 5 year old Dell Precision 690 which has dual proc’s (8 cores) and cheaper SAS/Sata combo cards on the motherboard. The case itself is the size of a server and can hold 4 drives in it (wired for 4 drives). They even take ECC ram and ddr2 ECC like that is cheap as dirt, you can easily get 32 gigs in it.

mikedavis · 2013-08-08T14:26:06.000Z

I’ve got a DL360 G5 running ESXi 5.1 I don’t think it’s on the compatibility list, but I know it will run it. The DL360 only support 4 2.5" drives, so that might be a factor for what you want to do.

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-08T15:00:09.000Z

4 drives are more than enough, can it handle sata without an adapter?

tylerschlief9906 · 2013-08-08T19:27:03.000Z

I have a Dell Optiplex 780 with a quad-core 9400Q processor, and 16GB RAM. The reason I went with this was support for DDR3 (earliest that I know of that would support it), and Core2Quad support (cheaper than the iCore processors at the time that I bought it.

With the RAM and the 2TB drive, and running ESXi 5.1 on a 2GB thumb drive, I’m out right at $300, although the processor was given to me. But you can find these systems all day on ebay for under $200. For another $150, get enough RAM and HD to have a decent system.

shawnlo · 2013-08-09T01:18:18.000Z

Wow I can not believe how cheap the Dell 2950 servers are on Ebay. I am currently still running these in production with vSphere 5.1. They do support vt-x however I do not believe they support vt-d. If I recall I think that you would want to check and ensure the processor supported VT-x.

VT-x is hardware assisted virtualization - in case of VI / vSphere it allows you to run 64bit VMs.

VT-d is VMDirectPath I/O - if you have VT-d capable hardware then you can passthrough PCI devices directly to VM.

austinparker4957 · 2013-08-19T13:09:04.000Z

Grabbed a 2950, it’s actually a GSA, but I’ll reflash it and it should work great, thank you again everyone for your help!