vSphere ESXi home lab

[kkarth]

Dear All,

Can anyone please advise the hardware (Motherboard, Processor, RAM, NIC etc. ) that is best suited for building a vSphere ESXi home lab ? My budget is under $1000 and would require 32GB RAM or if possible max 64GB RAM.

Cheers,

KK

[virtualg_uk]

This depends on how many VMs you want to test and what features etc.

You can setup a very minimal lab with an HP Microserver, but there are many guides online regarding this such as http://www.virten.net/2015/04/vmware-homelab-in-2015-systems-revised-with-vsphere-6/

[mordi]

or you can get 2 or 3 of these R410 with 64G and you can run everything , you will also need a gigabit switch and some storage

Dell PowerEdge R410 Server 2x2.26GHz Quad Core E5520 64GB 2x300GB 15K 1PS

[Vinny Santa Maria]

For the hosts in my home lab, I found some Dell R710s on ebay that came with rails, two power supplies, and an Enterprise iDRAC card. I upgraded the processors to dual X5670s (6 core, so 24 logical processors per host), and the RAM to 64GBs. Just that configuration brought each host up to ~$850 shipped (though mine have an additional Intel I350 quad port 1Gb card and an Intel x520-DA2 10G card, which would be an additional ~$180).