Episode 519 – Building the Ultimate White Box for under $2000
Building the ultimate white box ESXi server for under $2000! Can it be done? Darren and Matt grab the company credit card and answer that question.
<strong>Building the Ultimate White Box Server for under $2000</strong></p>
<p>When it comes to building a white box server for ESXi your best resources are <a href="http://vm-help.com/" target="_blank">vm-help.com</a>, <a href="http://ultimatewhitebox.com/" target="_blank">UltimateWhiteBox.com</a>, the <a href="http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php" target="_blank">VMware Compatibility Guide</a>, and the <a href="http://communities.vmware.com/home.jspa" target="_blank">VMware community</a>.</p> <p>We carefully selected ESXi supported components based on reliability and value. If this were the ultimate $3000 white box server we might have picked a server board with dual Xeon’s and ECC memory, but to keep it under that magic $2000 price point we went with beefy “desktop” components such as the <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202" target="_blank">Intel Core i7 920</a>, the <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131365" target="_blank">ASUS P6T Deluxe</a>, and <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145233" target="_blank">12 GB of Corsair XMS3</a> memory.</p>
<p>Drive wise you can’t go wrong with the <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116042" target="_blank">3ware 9650SE-4LPML</a>. It supports four SATA II drives in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD. It’s bigger brother the <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116045" target="_blank">9650SE-16ML</a> sixteen channel SATA II controller is hot too — just at three times the price. The 9650SE isn’t supported out of the box by ESXi, however 3ware provides a <a href="http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15548" target="_blank">knowledge base article and drivers</a> necessary to add support for the card after your ESXi box is built.</p> <p>Drive wise we picked up four <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284" target="_blank">Western Digital Caviar Black</a> 1TB drives since they’re cheap and reliable.</p> <p>To make things easy when installing all these components in our <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147101" target="_blank">Rosewill RSV-Z4000</a> 4U rackmount case we picked up a <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817707117" target="_blank">4 Drive trayless how swap sata backplane</a> from StarTech. IcyDock makes one too. This was the only $100 spent for convenience over performance/value, but anyone who has dealt with 5.25″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets will agree it’s worth every penny.</p>
<p>Rather than installing ESXi on the RAID, we used a 4GB USB drive from Patriot. The <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220251">Xporter XT</a>. It boasts really fast read/write times. I’m sure any old 1gb or larget USB drive would have done but they’re so cheap, why not?</p> <p>We’re doing a little white box server contest. Winners will get all sorts of swag from the <a href="http://www.hak5.org/hakshop/" target="_blank">Hak5 Store</a>. Check out all the details in the <a href="http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13481" target="_blank">episode release thread</a> at Hak5.org</p>
June 27 2009 11:47 am | Podcasts and e-life and hak.5 and technology