VM /ETC

I previously posted an email I received that provided a hardware shopping list for building cheap AMD or Intel ESX servers for home testing. There is also a few good recent discussions in the VMware Community Forums that provide more suggestions for compatible ESX hardware.

Cheap ESX Solution (Tests) discussion contains a table of motherboards and officially unsupported but working servers provided by Dave Mishchenko. Read the post for even more systems and parts to build working ESX servers.

ESX 3.5 test lab lists several desktop systems on which forum users have been successful in installing ESX.

Cheap ESX server, onboard SATA – Working !! starts off providing a parts list of a working ESX system, and then continues with tips and tricks to get ESX working.

Of course, all of the discussions as well as my previous post do not cover the cost of anything except the hardware for ESX. You also need to consider how you will build the complete VI3 environment. For example, you can run VC as a VM, and use Openfiler for your shared storage

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