I have recently update, or should I say replaced, most of the hardware on my ESXi server. My main reason for the upgrade is to build a storage server with the most of the hardware that I currently have and use the newer and faster hardware for the ESXi server. The storage limitation with ESXi 4.1 were too limiting for my needs, hosting the RPM files and linux distributions being server by my mirror server. The new ESXi server hardware is as follows:
Power supply: Seasonic SS-400ET 400W EPS12V (49$)
Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O (180$)
Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230 Sandy Bridge 3.2GHz (235$)
RAM: 4x Kingston 4GB DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 ECC (58$)
USB Key: TDK 4GB Mobile USB 2.0 Flash Drive (7$)
Case: Norco RPC-470 4U Rackmount Server Case (90$)
Current hypervisor software is VMware vSphere 4.1 (free). The server is connected with via a cross-over one gigabit (1Gb/s) iSCSI link to my storage server where I have mapped a 1.5Tb LUN to host the virtual machines. I will discuss this setup and configuration in more detail in a later post.
Performance has been very stable so far and there is a small but noticable increase in speed, especially processor intensive tasks, over the first build I did.
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