ESXi 4+ motherboard

[tribunal88]

I want to set up an ESXi box at home. Trouble is when I went to Whitebox HCL website (http://www.vm-help.com//esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php) , all the motherboards they had been confirmed working were out of stock in the brands/configurations I wanted.

I was hoping to get something that could run a quad core chip w/ 16G of RAM. I guess the real trouble is that I'm picky about my motherboards. I generally go right to the ASUS well. I understand Gigabytes are fairly reliable. How does ASRock fair?

In any case, does anyone have any suggestions about specific parts or places that might have a more recently updated list of whitebox compatibilities.

 

[mvbighead]

Not sure about finding your whitelists, but I do know that you should look to find a board with an integrated Intel or Broadcom NIC (preferably two). As I understand it, all Realtek and similar type NICs will not be detected, and I have experienced this myself.

I did luck out with my older board that had an NForce NIC that it picked up, and grabbed a PCIe Intel NIC to add so that one port is connected to my cable modem and connected to the PFSense VM that I have running, and the Intel NIC connects my VMs to my LAN. I have a rather cheap config, but with what you're looking to run/spend, you should be in very good shape.

EDIT: What I am really getting at is that you should worry so much about the model, but more so the components attached to the board. SCSI/RAID controllers, NICs, etc. should all be listed on their whitelist... just a find a board that has the ones you need, or buy a board that has supported NICs, and grab a compatible SCSI/RAID controller that you can throw in there.

 

[heymrdj]

Here's my build over at vm-help.com I built it using an MSI 890GX with a 1055T. Runs really strong with 16GB of RAM, and everything works perfect including onboard SATA if you want to use that. You will need a PCI/E NIC as ESXi doesn't like the Realtek chipsets, but you're stuck with that for just about every desktop mainboard alive and even some servers.

http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2197

 

[heymrdj]

Not sure about finding your whitelists, but I do know that you should look to find a board with an integrated Intel or Broadcom NIC (preferably two). As I understand it, all Realtek and similar type NICs will not be detected, and I have experienced this myself.

I did luck out with my older board that had an NForce NIC that it picked up, and grabbed a PCIe Intel NIC to add so that one port is connected to my cable modem and connected to the PFSense VM that I have running, and the Intel NIC connects my VMs to my LAN. I have a rather cheap config, but with what you're looking to run/spend, you should be in very good shape.

EDIT: What I am really getting at is that you should worry so much about the model, but more so the components attached to the board. SCSI/RAID controllers, NICs, etc. should all be listed on their whitelist... just a find a board that has the ones you need, or buy a board that has supported NICs, and grab a compatible SCSI/RAID controller that you can throw in there.

Sound advice, but the HCL doesn't stay current enough to get you high end hardware that's really current. The volunteers that try their hardware and post their success on places like vm-help.com help keep home esxi users as bleeding edge as possible.