ESXi Server for Home

Why'd you spec out something $2000 over your budget

Anyway, you could do without the dual cpus, just get a single Xeon E3 setup

That's true. Have you thought about puttin ga GPU in the system as well?

My first question is why so much RAM? I don't see anywhere near the need for 64GB.

How many HDDs are you going to use? Do you absolutely need the RE4 benefits? What is your total storage requirement?

ESXi in itself isnt RAM hungry, only when you're running VMs that use the RAM

This. I built a vsphere test server for my job, with a single i7 3820, 4*8GB ram, 3 NICs and a bunch of HDDs, and it works great for running 12+ VMs.

With say, 8 VMs are running, its using less than 10GB of ram. The VMs use however much RAM you put for them, plus like 24MB per 1GB extra for overhead.


Deffinately go with a single CPU, still socket 2011, and get a RAID card. thats the ONE thing I know the build I have is lacking in, have to spread around VMs so they actually run without choking each other. I went socket 2011 for the quad channel as well, but honestly dual CPU is majorly overkill unless you plan on doing processing almost constantly. We have another dual 1366 6cores rig that pretty much sits at 1% or less CPU usage because its running a ton of webservers. (almost no research went into buying the server, that was before me )

My suggestion:

i7 3930 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116492
Whatever mobo you want (I personally picked an AsRock Extreme4 and its working great so far)
4*8GB RAM, you can always add more later!
Then those HDDs and the Raid card, whatever case that fits the mobo, and a good PSU.

vSphere is pretty damn good at balancing CPU loads, so if youre rendering on one OS while working in another, depending on HDD usage you shouldnt see too much slow down, but going single CPU will save a LOT of money, though sacrificing a LOT of power, but I don't think as much as you might think.


EDIT: so just noticed this...

You REALLY dont want to do FreeNAS in vsphere. better to build a seperate server for that. really.

vSphere works with datastores, not the physical drives, and as of right now datastores cannot be larger than 2TB, meaning with a single large RAID group it may be quite a pain in the butt, so trying to get them working in vsphere alongside other VMs... well... it would be very interesting. Just wanted to warn you before you started solidifying your purchase plans.
Edited by Fooxz - 5/31/12 at 7:38pm

Ah, I was wondering if you'd be using ZFS.

Problem there is that usually a home environment doesn't have enough load to warrant the caching features of ZFS. Don't get me wrong, once I went ZFS on my home server I've been in love with it - but the use of the memory cache is severely limited in a home environment. 8GB would be plenty I would think, if not slightly overkill unless you are constantly accessing specific information.

Off the top of my head I'd say 2GB for the router, 2-4 for Ubuntu/W8 depending on purpose. As for the W7 guest for the encoding - how much editing to you actually do? The times I've re-encoded with HandBrake RAM usage didn't go much above 4GB on a 1080p video file. So, all in total you could get by easily with 32GB. Could drop a nice amount in the price, especially considering if you want quad channel you'd drop from 8GB ECC DIMMs to 4GB.

If you need 9TB of usable space and RAIDZ2, you'd need 8 drives, and that would give you ~10TB of usable space. Using 6 drives instead would give you 8TB of usable space. However, I do not believe you'd need a dedicated RAID card since you'd be running (effectively) software RAID within the guests. What you'd need instead is a decent controller card (which in most cases would still be a RAID card at ~8 ports available). For example, check out this RocketRAID 2320 card. Still a RAID card, yes, but you're looking for a decent controller not a decent piece of hardware RAID. RocketRAID makes very solid controllers, and this would shave a few hundred off.

Alternatively, you could get a few ~$50 4-port SATA controller cards. Performance might vary there, I honestly don't know but it could still save some cash.


EDIT:
Fooxz, I was under the impression VMWare could pass the physical block device on Intel platforms if the processor supports VT-d, which the Xeons do. Is that not correct, or is there more to it?
Edited by TurboTurtle - 5/31/12 at 7:48pm