I've got a couple of Cisco C-Series servers in my basement making noise and heat.  We're looking at moving soon and I won't have a dedicated room for equipment.  I'm looking to tone down the noise and heat load coming from my ESXi server(s) and storage.  Storage is no problem, but a decent server build has me scratching my head a bit.  It's been a while since I really looked at CPUs, etc.

I'm currently thinking about getting a SuperMicro uATX motherboard with an E3-12xx CPU.  I may have 8GB sticks of ECC RAM that I can pull from some decom'd servers at work to fill the board.  That would put me at about $350 before rackmount case and power supply.

Other option is to go with a desktop board with a K version i5 or i7 with 4 DIMM slots, but the cost may be the same if I have to buy RAM, and it will be a desktop motherboard.

Anyone out there done this and have a recipe?

All I care about for lab shit is stuffing as much RAM as I possibly can in each host and 2+ core VT Intel processors.  Quad core or better if you can swing it but I don't get hung up on i5/7 vs. Xeon.  I would focus on RAM, cores, and fast storage, in enough quantity for at least 2 hosts so that you can play with HA features, vSAN, etc.

If you go with desktop stuff you'll be able to get away with less heat and space.  Unless you're doing some seriously compute intensive stuff, I don't think server-class hardware is necessary.

Just my .02.

Is this for a lab environment or are you running serious workloads?

I've run it on an atom cpu

I highly recommend the Dell T7500's on Ebay.

You can get dual-hex core X5650 Xeon's, with 96GB of ram, for $700.

These are towers, lots of storage capacity, and big slow RPM fans that generate very little noise, on a server motherboard.  I have been using the Dell Precision series for my lab machines for 7 years now.  They have been fantastic.  I run Hyper-V, however.

That's a good price for some solid turnkey ESXi hosts.  Well, Hyper-V in your case.

If you don't mind my asking, why Hyper-V?  I have nothing against it.  In fact, I think it's really interesting in its Server 2016 iteration.  VMware is just so omnipresent that I like to ask about Hyper-V when I see someone using it.





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I support large enterprise customers who run Hyper-V as their virtualization backbone, for a living.  VMWare is by far more prevalent in the enterprise customer space, but they all have some amount of Hyper-V for reduced costs, like lab, prototype, dev environments, and sometimes they are 100% Microsoft shop all the way.  Since customers already have to license their procs to run Microsoft workloads, it is practically free.  Most large enterprises I work with (Fortune "1" and down) already license the procs for System Center as well (SCOM, SCCM, SCORCH, and others)

I love it.  Shared nothing live migration and Hyper-V replica make it CRAZY simple to keep a lab running with high availability and ease of use.


I buy a couple of these T7500's, and throw in 3 - SSD drives.  That's enough to keep all VM's on SSD, everything is snappy.  If I felt like I needed more space efficiency I just turn on dedup.  I was using the Precision 690's before these.  I am just about ready to upgrade, and the price on these has hit the floor.  Waiting just a bit longer for the superfast dual x5690 CPU models to drop in price.

Gotcha.  I'm in that same space and that's exactly where and how I see it deployed.  I was curious if perhaps you had it somewhere as the production hypervisor for most or all workloads.  I haven't seen Hyper-V employed at that level yet (not outside small organizations anyway) but I know it has been done.

I'm mostly curious how Hyper-V and System Center/SCOM/VMM compares at scale to the usual VSphere suite deployment.  Haven't yet run into anyone with that apples to apples experience and probably won't until/unless Hyper-V turns that corner and becomes a bigger player.  



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Those T7500s look like a pretty good deal, just wish they were smaller.  

I'm wanting to build a 3 host cluster using Intel NUCs but I don't want to spend the money yet.

This one looks interesting.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157614



Only two SATA ports but it has one PCIe connector for some expandability.

Hmmm.... it seems to say that it will run on an external DC input instead of the standard internal power supply connector.

 
Hmmm....

And if you need a PCIe x8 slot, 32 gigs of ram, or 4 6gbps SATA ports, the next Asrock board looks nice.

Then you have this Intel board with a PCIe x16 and 3 PCIe x8 slots to run multiple RAID, 10g, etc adapters if you can live without an IPMI ethernet port.


Neither come with processors, but should handle LGA 1150 based Xeon E3-12xx or Haswell i3 chips.