Title: Building a White Box
Session ID: V16760
In this session Eric Sloof details his journey to install ESX Server on white box commodity hardware. This is not rocket science (and it's certainly not supported!), but is great for home labs and test labs for those who know what they're doing. You can't slap any old motherboard, nic, and disk drive together and expect it to work, but if you want to try it.
Perhaps I should explain the term ""ESX Whitebox"" a little bit more since I have been digging into this matter so much that I even got the slang down. An ESX whitebox is a piece of hardware (or rather a combination of different hardware pieces) that will run ESX. Sounds pretty self-explanatory right? Well, the key thing here is that it is not that hard to find hardware that runs ESX without any issues. In fact, VMware even has a list up that details exactly which hardware is supported by ESX so it's not so hard to find supported hardware. The problem is that this is mostly server hardware which equals expensive, big, heavy and noisy. Not something I was looking for.
Richard Garsthagen about the public voting:
Starting today and ending on May 26th you can vote on what sessions you would like to see at this year's VMworld. We received a record amount of session submissions. We where not able to publish them all in the public voting system as some have 'confidential' stuff in them or others did not follow the basic submission rules, but more then 600 submissions did make it into the public voting system. So please browse around and let us know what you want to see during the next VMworld events.
You can find public voting here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote