I met Michel Roth (thincomputing.net) at the XTG V-Event last week and we were talking about blogging :-) and his white box. He finally managed to build it and it looks impressive. It’s small aesthetical, pleasing and under $1000.
In my day (and night?) job working for Quest I get to demonstrate the Virtual Access Suite (VAS) a lot. In short this means that I have to demo a VAS infrastructure at the very least consisting of a VAS Connection Broker, a VAS Terminal Server, a VAS Virtual Desktop, a Domain Controller, a VirtualCenter server and a ESX host. With a lot of time and patience one would be able to get pretty far with this with a decent laptop up until ESX. ESX will not run on "normal laptop hardware". Period. So let me share how I found my ultimate ESX Whitebox.
Thursday, October 16. 2008
Michel Roth’s Ultimate Whitebox
Wednesday, March 26. 2008
Dave Mishchenko’s Whitebox list
Yesterday Dave over at vm-help.com posted a comment on the ultimate white box article with an URL. I tough let’s give it a try and visited his website. What I saw there was incredible, a complete list with Motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 3.5 and / or 3i Installable.
Tuesday, March 25. 2008
The ultimate ESX 3.5 white box
Since running ESX 3.5 on Workstation 6 seems to be impossible, I had to find another way to explore the new features of ESX 3.5. Searching for a cheap supported configuration isn’t an easy job. You have to find a supported motherboard, network card and SATA controller. I have found a desktop with all these items combined. You can use The HP Compaq d530 - Small form factor (SFF) DG755A desktop. My model has a CPU from Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.8 GHz, a NIC from Broadcom Corporatoin NetXtreme BCM5782 Gigabit Ethernet and a SATA 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller. I added a 512 Mb memory bank so I have 1 Gigabyte in total. Enough to host a few virtual machines :-).
