My parts boxes I am not used to this sort of thing I forgot to take pics before I built the machine. 

The built machine I am very happy with my fan and power supply choice, two case fans installed, the fans came with rubber mounting lugs and are 4 pin pwm power connectors so the mother board controls the case fan speed, another case fan will be installed when I add more hard drive data storage, but its fine for now.

Power supply is well on top of its job, and again the fan is pwm controled by power supply it's self, which all makes for lower power consumption and less noise.

Noise is an issue as I plan to locate this server in a spare bedroom, my old server had to be in the garage because of the almighty roar it makes.

The case looks good enough for me, front panel has a filter and mounting points for two case fans so should keep out some of the dust. I have not bothered with a CD/DVD drive as I did not see the need for one, having installed ESXI on a memory stick and VM machines will be installed from images.

So for a budget end case it does the job.

Power consumption I know is not the lowest that can be achieved but compared to the power consumption of my old set up I am very pleased.

 The first 24hrs I have most of my VM's transfered and running and data transfered, I hope to get it all completed today.

The DOA hard drive is ready to be sent back for a replacement, in the mean time I will order a Intel 8 Port SAS Controller SASUC8I ready to get the ZFS working when I get the replacement dirve.

Well I decided it was time to replace my ageing second hand server machine I purchased for £45.00 over 2 years ago and has served me well running ESXi 3.5 allowing me to learn a little about Vmware.

My current setup :-

• Power Hungry
• HP Proliant ML530 G2
• 12 Gb Ram
• ESXI 3.5
• 7 Vms
• 12 * 72.9Gb Drives (Raid 5)
• hilo

  My target machine in order of priority:-

1. Substantially lower power consumption 
2. Budget
3. Data security
4. Storage expandability
5. Hardware raid
6. NAS in same box
7. System perfomance upgrade
8. Quieter operation
9. Reasonable spec machine
10. Hilo or similiar

Well my first thought was to buy a second hand HP Proliant DL380 G5/G6, reason being that when I put ESXi 3.5 on my old server it just worked out of the box, so I reasoned that ESXi 5 might do the same and it would give me most of my target list , but when started looking around at what I could get for my money it did not get me  4,8 and 9 of my target list so I ruled out this option.

I then started looking and new HP servers, ML110,330 range and the NL36/40 micro server range of machines, but buying one of these machines either blew my budget or in the case of the micro server I did not give me item 4 on my target list.

 So I decided to have a look at putting together a white box and started Googling, what I found was there is loads of information around but not so much regarding white boxes and ESXi5 anyway after many hours I finally decided that hardware raid would have to go as each time I looked at adding hardware raid it blew my budget, sure there are second hand raid cards out there but only being a budding computer geek I was not confident I could make it all work. So after many hours more I finally decided hardware raid would have to go and I decided on ZFS instead.

My hardware list is as follows: -

• Supermicro X9SCM-F-0 Motherboard
• 16Gb Ram Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/4GEC-4GB DDR3-1333
• Intel BX80623E31230 XEON E3-1230 3.2Ghz Processor
• Antec VSK200 Mid Tower Case
• Power Supply TR-450PCUK 450 watts
• 2 1TB Segate ST1000DM003 Sata3 Hard Drives
• 1 Western Digital 500gb Sata 3 Hard Drive + (1 as Upgrade)
• 2 Akasa AF-FN057 120mm Case Fans
• 4gb Usb Memory sticks.
• Intel 8 Port SAS Controller SASUC8I

 All the parts arrived and after building up the machine fired it up, with the usb stick plugged into the on board USB port, I entered bios set up, set the USB stick as the boot drive, and setup the other bios settings as this 7.2  Set needed Bios settings left all the other bios settings as default, rebooted machine.

I now have a working ESXi 5 server however one of the 1TB Segate ST1000DM003 hard drives was DOA so that had to go back, other issue is that the Intel 82579LM Nic is not recognized by ESXi 5   but apart from that all seems good to go.

Configuration

I planned to use the 500gb drive running on one of the Sata III headers on the MB for all for the VM's and the 1TB Segate ST1000DM003 hard drives will supply data storage for all the VM's using a freenas 8 (ZFS) VM to present ISCSI to the all the other Vm's for data storage.

I thought before I put this together that I might be able to install ESXI5 on a USB Stick and Freenas 8 on second USB stick, and then pass through the MB Sata Drive controller to Freenas which would allow me to run a couple of 500gb HD in ZFS mirrored configuration for the VM's  to give me some redundancy,  but so far I have not be able to figure out how to install ESXI and Freenas as VM on a USB stick as ESXI does not appear to see USB sticks as storage devices.

Well as things turned out I have been forced to put my new server in to operation earlier than planned as just as I had got it built and running even before I got the DOA hard drive replaced, my old server started giving me paritiy errors.

As I  don't need high availability I am happy to back up my VM's and re install them in the event the 500Gb hard drive fails, In addition I run a nightly back up routine to an external NAS of all the data, and my important data is backed up when it changes within 10 mins of a change.

Conclusion

 Well how did I get on with my targets ?

1. Power consumption:-  OLD: 425 watts - NEW: 55 watts
2. Budget:- Slightly under budget 
3. Data Security:-  when ZFS is running should be okay jury is out at the moment 
4. Storage Expansion:-  4 additional drives possible and ZFS should allow easy expansion 
5. Hardware Raid:-  Not achieved due to budget constraint 
6. Nas in same box:- Yes 
7. System Perfomance:-  Yes much better very noticeable  
8. Quieter Operation:-  Old: a load roar - New: Yeah ultra quiet 
9. Reasonable spec machine:-  Yes happy with the spec 
10. Hilo or similiar:-  Yes Super Micro IPMI 

 In conclusion I am very happy at the moment, I have achieved most of what I wanted, when I have my DOA hard drive replaced and then I can fit the Intel 8 Port SAS Controller SASUC8I and set up ZFS for the data drives, I hope that this will then give me the data security I am looking for.

Looking to the near future when I have ZFS set up on the data drives I will look at how I might achieve redundancy on the ESXi install hard drive's.

Upgrades would be a SSD cache drive for ESXI plus 32gb ram instead of the current 16gb, and a hot spare data drive and that should keep me going for a while.

Comments and suggestions welcome