At home I currently run a desktop PC, laptop, and another 2 computers running as servers. I am looking at reducing energy costs so as VMWare ESXi 4.1 can be downloaded for free and having experience in it from work (70 odd virtual servers) I am investigating upgrading.

Plan would be to virtualise everything, so that will be the 2 servers, and the Windows 7 desktop onto a single machine. I dont play games on the desktop, so using RDP from my laptop to the desktop is no problem.

Now, I know I can buy a PC with 24GB of ram, but they are aimed at gamers. I dont want a fancy graphics card, blu-ray, card reader or anything, I dont even need an OS. I want a basic PC with onboard graphics, i7 CPU, 24GB of ram and a DVD Rom drive, I'll need to add an intel network card for ESXi though, so it must have spare slots.

I can get one for £850 still overspec'd, but can I get cheaper.

WOW, thats alot of RAM.

I've just bought a 2nd hand DL385 dual core 2.2ghz server with 8gb RAM x4 72gb 10k discs for less than £200. I'm going to buy a full 16GB RAM for it and can't imagine I'll use it all in the next 3-4years with my virtualised estate, which currently consists of 7 2003 servers and soon to be upgraded to 2008.

My Current ESX3.5 server is a quad core q6600 with 8gb ram x4 250gb 7500rpm discs which runs the 7 virtual servers with no problems although I did get some disk i/o slow performance and upgraded my sata raid card from a 2410sa (64mb cache) to a 3405(128mb cache with BBWC) and all has been fine since.

My only reason for the upgrade is I want to use VSphere4.1

Make sure you check the HCL as ESXi is quite funny over what hardware it uses, my current raid card while supported doesn't display the physical hard discs so I don't know if 1 has failed without rebooting the entire server to check the array post screen.

Matthew

I did this exercise about 2 years ago now

My primary reason was to try to reduce energy costs, and recon its already paid for itself.

I actually use VMware server rather than ESX, as it means the host machine ( Windows 2003 ) can also act as my 2nd desktop. This is much faster than using a virtual box as 2nd desktop - more flexible too

At home I currently run a desktop PC, laptop, and another 2 computers running as servers. I am looking at reducing energy costs so as VMWare ESXi 4.1 can be downloaded for free and having experience in it from work (70 odd virtual servers) I am investigating upgrading.

<SNIP>

I want a basic PC with onboard graphics, i7 CPU, 24GB of ram and a DVD Rom drive, I'll need to add an intel network card for ESXi though, so it must have spare slots.

I can get one for £850 still overspec'd, but can I get cheaper.

I think your main problem will be storage, ESXi is fussy (very fussy) about the storage controller and doesn't support the SATA controllers on most desktop systems. You may need a SAS controller and disks to make it work which will bump the cost up...