After 8 days of trying to prevent data loss and disaster, I finally can sit back and relax and finish building my ESXi host.
I have enough RAM, but I am adding more, but I am going to move some workloads over this weekend. This new ESXi host will replace two existing ESXi hosts, a file server, and most applications on an application server.
- Two E5-2630v4 Xeon hosts
- 128GB of RAM (probably upgrade to 256GB before end of year), can upgrade to 512 without replacing RAM and up to 2TB of RAM if I rip out and replace.
- Quadro K620 which will do a PCI pass though for transcoding
- NVS510 for Video and secondary encoding if needed
- 1275W power supply, that was a pleasant surprise
- Two 1GB Intel Ethernet ports on the motherboard
- Two 10GB SFP+ ports on an expansion card
Storage deserves its own section
- Has an HP Z Turbo drive which was a huge surprise that is compatible with ESXi 7.
- Has a Perc H200E with external mini SAS SFF 8088. Can support 8 external drives, got a drive cage for that (more pix in the future). Note that this card is NOT ESXi 7 compatible, I intend to passthrough the card to a VM.
- Built in to the motherboard are 6 traditional AHCI SATA ports
- Another 8 SAS Ports
- Internally I can fit four 3.5″ drives SATA or SAS, they go to the onboard SAS Ports.
- Two external drive bays are fitted with 6x drive ICY Dock Tough Armor MB608SP-B for a total of 12 2.5″ drives.
- With 12 drives external and 4 drives internal I do not have enough ports, so I added an HP H240 HBA in IT mode. This is SAS3 which can support 12GB/s.
- The HP Z turbo drive is the main boot drive (no USB flash drives this time), a 512GB SSD is a backup ESXi7 drive, and I also have a 256GB SSD Rocky Linux Drive, and a 128GB SSD Drive for testing.
- If you are keeping track that leaves me with 9 2.5″ drives for VMFS data stores, 4 3.5″ drives for VMFS data stores and 8 external (via passthrough on a VM) 3.5″ drives.
Having fun, this should last me a couple of years.
Oh, also saw a great deal on a small PC, at raspberry prices where they are at today, why not. It was $60 and can do h.264 encoding on the i3 CPU.
Weight: 314.6