What do you use for your ESXi Server

Tempted to build my own Ryzen system for ESXi, but for now I'm using an old Dell Poweredge R710 at home for my home lab. It's running a pair of E5620's (4/8 @ 2.4Ghz), has 32GB RAM and I use cheapo SSDs for storage (It's my home lab... Not all that concerned if a drive fails).
 
10x Cisco UCSB-B200-M5's each with dual Xeon Gold 6132's and 512GB of RAM
7x Cisco UCSB-B200-M3's each with dual Xeon E5-2650's and 352GB of RAM

That's most of our production environment in one datacenter. We have another 12 M3's with various CPU's and RAM in satellite centers.

I have a Proliant DL360 G7 here at home I use for sandbox. I don't use it much due to the noise.
 
For our production servers, I need to max out the RAM on them badly. I'd be able to consolidate more VM's for sure. Riccochet: What are you using for storage for all those units?
 
Space_Ranger said:
For our production servers, I need to max out the RAM on them badly. I'd be able to consolidate more VM's for sure. Riccochet: What are you using for storage for all those units?
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80GB PATA Seagate's
 
Space_Ranger said:
For our production servers, I need to max out the RAM on them badly. I'd be able to consolidate more VM's for sure. Riccochet: What are you using for storage for all those units?
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Kaminario K2 all flash arrays, 240 TB worth of nodes and 60 TB Tintri hybrid flash.
 
I'm using a 2700X, 64GB RAM, a 2TB 860 Evo SSD and a 2TB WD Black Spinning Drive as my dev box. Not worried about data loss on this one as I use copies of our production server's backups to set these up.

Boots up and runs individual VMs faster than our prod servers! (Dual CPU Xeon Silvers)
 
I FINALLY set up my old 24 bay supermicro 2u server that I couldn't decide what to do with yesterday up at work.

I know its older specs but it should run anything I throw at it even still. I'm a small 2 man PC repair shop and can't afford as much as the bigger guys.

Right now the only thing I'm running on it is my simple help server which is how I remote into my clients computers.

Specs
ESXI 6.7u2 on a 32GB USB Drive
2x E5620 CPUs
52GB ECC Registered DDR3 RAM
10x 2.5" 900GB 10K SAS Drives
 
I have my home server setup to run just my pfSense router and FreeNAS mainly but toss random VMs on for testing as well.
Specs:
SM X8DT6
2x 5670L CPUs
48GB ECC Reg
I350-T4
X540-AT2
 
Meagre compared to some setups.
I7-4790/Asrock B85M-pro4/32gig ram
Main vm store is a 256gig Samsung 850 pro
Pass through on an m1505 to 8x2gb drives for raidZ2 (freenas)

I had a Chelsio dual 10gig Nic in there but decided it was just power I didn’t need to burn.
 
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I've got a Supermicro MicroCloud 5038ML-H8TRF in my basement with eight nodes:
  • Xeon E3 v3
  • 32GB (4x8GB)
  • 16GB SataDOM for ESXi
  • 128GB SSD
  • 2TB HDD
  • ConnectX-2 40Gb Infiniband (Soon to be converted to 10GbE via QSA adapters)
They're interconnected right now via a Mellanox IS5024 Infiniband switch and a pair of HP 1810-24G gigabit switches, stacked in a StarTech 12U rack. Shared storage is handled by an E3 v2/16GB X9SCM running ZFS on Linux with 6x 12TB SATA drives and 48x 42x 2TB SAS drives. (Combined NAS and backup into single chassis.) My next upgrade is an HP 14U rack and an Arista DCS-7124SX 10GbE switch. Moving from Infiniband to fiber in order to support vSphere 6.7U2.

I've basically had the same setup since 2015 and it's been wonderful. I don't see myself needing to upgrade for at least another 3-4 years. (Well, aside from replacing all those 2TB SAS drives with something a bit... Bigger.)

Here's a photo I found from back when I first built the setup, before Infiniband and dual-path routing for the management network. I'll attach another once my new rack gets built out. (Rack arrives Wednesday, fiber cables Friday I think)
E90EleOh.jpg
 
I currently run an older Dell r720, dual L5640 (6/12 each) with 96gb eec ram. I am still setting things up, and I use proxmox (switching to a docker setup though), currently it is my Minecraft server, NAS, development testing (node server, database server), Plex server, working on setting up a few more things like separating my TV capture from the Plex server, adding an ldap server and DHCP. May or may not end up doing dns as well, but that would be further out.
 
I manage our vmware infrastructure for the critical systems here at work. We run clusters of 3-5 hosts being R730's with dual 18 core Xeon's at 2.1 Ghz with 512 gig of ram each. Mated to a VNX 5400 with a bunch of storage mixed between SSD and 15k RPM SAS drives. To R740's with dual 18 core Xeons at 2.3 GHZ with 512gig mated to Unity 350's all SSD.
 
Grimlakin said:
I manage our vmware infrastructure for the critical systems here at work. We run clusters of 3-5 hosts being R730's with dual 18 core Xeon's at 2.1 Ghz with 512 gig of ram each. Mated to a VNX 5400 with a bunch of storage mixed between SSD and 15k RPM SAS drives. To R740's with dual 18 core Xeons at 2.3 GHZ with 512gig mated to Unity 350's all SSD.
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Got my home server beat :). I think my wife would kick me to the curb if I told her I wanted a few more servers, lol.
 
Ready4Droid said:
Got my home server beat :). I think my wife would kick me to the curb if I told her I wanted a few more servers, lol.
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Thankfully I'm on a group that actually gets decent dev machines to use. Our dev cluster is 3 of the R730's mentioned above.

Right now I'm trying to have dell give us a demo unit with a Nvidia card so I can try out some virtualized testing for our apps. Not so I can try a game nope no how.. would never ever probably ever do that. ;)
 
Oh, at work my 'desktop' is a dual Xeon with o think 8/16 each... I was just talking about my home server that I use to play around with for funzies.
 
Dell VxRail P570F - Xeon 6246R (16C/32T) - 768GB RAM - 2 x 480 GB SDD for OS, 12 x 3.84 SSD per host for storage.
16 in a rack, combined with a OOB SW (for iDrac) and 2 x Juniper SW for LAN (4 x 25 Gbit/s link per host)
Multiple racks on multiple sites.
 
ViewPort said:
Dell VxRail P570F - Xeon 6246R (16C/32T) - 768GB RAM - 2 x 480 GB SDD for OS, 12 x 3.84 SSD per host for storage.
16 in a rack, combined with a OOB SW (for iDrac) and 2 x Juniper SW for LAN (4 x 25 Gbit/s link per host)
Multiple racks on multiple sites.
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Nice setup. You can run a bunch of stuff on that. Must be storage heavy though. VDI hosts?
 
Grimlakin said:
Nice setup. You can run a bunch of stuff on that. Must be storage heavy though. VDI hosts?
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They all run ESXi 7.0u3 and run all sorts of VM's in single-site, dual-site and Disaster Recovery as a Service config.
Each pod Leaf-SW's are connected to a Spines (that is connected to Super-Spines)

Designed a POD to run VDI's (also VxRAIL), each hosts had 4 GPU's...holy powerload :LOL:
 
My old fx-8320 AM3+ rig with 32gb of ram and an ssd. Haven't turned it on in like 5 years, need to part it out and sell it.

At work it's all UCS stacks with M4 / M5 blades in them.

If I ever wanted/needed another esxi test environment I would probably just cascade it in workstation. Slow as hell but it can work.
 
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