VMware WhiteBox

For at least a year now I was thinking about having dedicated virtualization hardware. I cannot even name all applications that I'd like to use on this box. Today you can literally virtualize everything, even hypervisors (nested ESXi). Just to name some most important:

• VMware (studies on nested LAB)
• IOS XR VM's
• WLC - to rebuild my home wireless network (I have Cisco 2702i SAP)
• Storage, DLNA, torrent - to replace my old good Qnap TS-212
• N1kV, vASA and so on
• Replace my old, good QNAP TS212 with FreeNAS VM

I can probably make this list 5 times longer. Looks like nowadays it's all about virtualization. You may like or not, it's not gonna change. You'd better like it. :)

Anyways, I thought about multiple scenarios. As much as I want to treat this as an investment, I'd still like to minimize associated costs.

I was considering every single platform, starting from old XEON, through all CPU's including AMD AM1 & intel ATOM platform up to current i5/i7 processors. I was trying to share some luns from my QNAP TS212 via iSCSI and boot my HP notebook from those luns, but it revealed to be extremely slow, so I just gave up after few days of trying. Naturally, my main concern was amount of RAM which can possibly be handled by mentioned platforms. I was really convinced to buy Intel Atom Avoton C2550 - 14W TDP, support for 64GB RAM seems to be what I really need. But then surprisingly I've just became owner of brand new Intel Xeon E5-2690-v2 CPU. Kind of 0verkill. 10 physical cores + hyper threading, support for 256GB ram looks to be much more than I actually needs. But it really changed my mindset. Mainboard for brand new Avoton seems to cost as much as for my new Xeon CPU. And I already have CPU. There was no decission to made - I just had to build up server on already owned Xeon CPU. Otherwise I would have three thousands dollars worth keychain.

Okay, so what else do we need to go?

• Mainboard
• Case
• Cooler
• Power Supply
• Memory
• Storage

Mainboard:

After doing quite a lot of research I've decided to go for Asus Z9PA-U8. This is twin baby to Z9PA-D8 which is certified for VMware 5.5 and the only significant difference is 1 CPU socket and ability to have all 256RAM supported by single CPU. I don't really expected to have second identical CPU in nearest future, so I decided to go for single-socket MB.

Case:

The choice was really hard, because there is a bunch of really good cases on the market. My main requirements was lots of 3,5" bays, PSU on the bottom, support for ATX and nice layout - I am gonna put it on my living room (at least for the beginning). It had to be quiet as well. Ocasionally I have guests sleeping there. I also asked my wife about her opinion on this - and finally I decided to buy Fractal Design Define R4. 

Cooler:

This was really hard one. I want this to be quiet as much as possible. At the other hand my CPU is having 130W TDP. After hours spend on researching this I decided to go for Scythe Grand Kama Cross 2. Yeah, I know that I could have same results for about half of the price, but I just like this brand (I used to have Scythe Katana a while ago) but you know - it looks so cool!

PSU:

Also hard choice. While you want to spent as less as possible, you feel that if you buy cheap PSU you gonna burn your flat to the ground in case of failure. Not only your motherboard. So I just used PSU calculator and figured out, that I need c.a. 300W of power. Plus some reasonable space for the future :) Modular cabling etc. I choose SilentiumPC Duos M1. It has 80+ Bronze and all required safeguards. 550W should be reasonable amount of power.

Memory:

Again, don't ask, but I have three DDR3 ECC-R dimms (2x4GB, 1x8GB) on my desk available to use. Probably in the nearest future I'll go for additional 2x16GB.

Storage:

Re-use. I have two 1TB 7200 RPM HDDs in my QNAP already. I also have 2 500GB 7200 SATA drives (2,5"). I'll start with 2,5" drives. I think that eventually I'll buy another 1TB drive and go for Raid-5.

SUMMARY

So I just ordered Case, Mainboard, Cooler and PSU today. It should allow me to run this box and see whether this is good investment or not. Hopefully it is, so far it cost almost as much as an iPAD AIR.
What I'm gonna do next few weeks is to put all those things together, boot ESXi from SD or USB stick, then the plan is to boot some NAS appliance under ESXi using another usb stick. Then make software raid on HDDs and share them as iSCSI targets to nested ESXi infrastructure.

Stay Tuned, I'll update you after a while to let you know how this works for me.