For my own personal amusement and to get some experience installing and administrating a VMware ESXi server, I decided to build my own! After much research of the Whitebox HCL I decided on the parts that I was fairly certain would work with ESXi and put together this:
| Motherboard | ASUS M4A78LT-M |
| CPU | AMD Athlon II X3 Tri Core 450 3.20GHz |
| RAM | Corsair Value 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz |
| Network Card | Intel PRO/1000 GT PCI Desktop Adapter |
| Storage | Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache |
| Case | Cooler Master Elite 360 Mini Tower Case |
| Power | OcUK Swift 500W V2 |
Installing VMware ESXi 5.0 on it was a surprisingly smooth process, I wasn’t even sure if it was going to work at all when I started but it ran with no errors at all.
I now use it to test ideas, practice networking techniques and play with different Operating Systems knowing that I’m easily able to swap out one virtual machine for another whenever I need to. As I find different uses for it I will probably be posting about them here.