J1900 / VmWare ESXi

[Jorevf]

Hi,

I was thinking of building me a small ESXi server, where I would run som small VM's..
Like Firewall, DNS, and some other things.

And found a J1900 based card that looked good..
But, based on information on the net, there is no official support for the J1900 ased cards, and some has manage to get it to work with some strange tweaking..

But most of the people has not got it to work..

Some people talks about using other virtual host server, like a regular Linux system..

But I really want to run ESXi, as I use it for other stuff, and feel pretty home with it..

I did find another small card, with two NIC's and is using i3/i5/i7 CPU and I thought it could be the one..

It's and IPC LGA1155 H61 card.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/IPC-...-motherboard-M61-DVI-VGA-dual/1932891702.html

Does anybody here have any experience with it, ot do anybody have good experience with a small sized card, and using it as a tiny ESXi server?

Thanks in advance..

Regards,
Fred

 

[Jmtyra]

Greatly depends on your budget, but there are some excellent Mini-ITX boards available out there for building whitebox ESXi servers. The main item to check is the CPU feature set; make sure it's 64-bit and fully supports virtualization (e.g. check the ARK page for the CPU).

Here are a few sites (and articles) that I usually check for ideas, example homelab builds and compatible hardware:

https://www.vmguru.com/2014/02/building-a-new-esxi-whitebox/
http://thehomeserverblog.com/tag/esxi-whitebox/
http://www.veriton.co.uk/roller/fmw/entry/white_box_server_build_2014
https://mellowd.co.uk/ccie/?p=5746
http://www.virtualvcp.com/news/199-new-esxi-whitebox-servers-for-home-lab

Also consider which version of ESXi you want to run and the associated hardware it supports.
http://www.v-front.de/2015/02/whats-in-esxi-60-for-free-license-and.html