my whitebox systems

If someone who plan to make virtual host machine is, in my think, maybe need reference model.

So, I'm going to show you my whitebox specification.

At first time, I regarded about AMD system, it has enough physical cores and performance.

but changed my mind. because there was no latest reference anywhere. it was big risk for me.

As you know, intel i7 series processor is recognized as Xeon E3 series processor in vSphere host machine. It's point why I should configure this systems.



System 1 (Host1)

Intel ivy-bridge i7-3770   
Samsung DDR3 8G PC3-12800    4ea
GIGABYTE GA-H77-D3H rev.1.0 (built in Atheros AR8151 NIC)
WD 1TB BLUE WD10EZEX    1ea
500W Power supply
Realtek 8168E    3ea
Realtek 8169    1ea
Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual port    1ea


System 2 (Host2)

Intel ivy-bridge i7-3770
Samsung DDR3 8G PC3-12800    4ea
GIGABYTE GA-H77-D3H rev.1.1 (built in Atheros AR8161 NIC)
WD 1TB BLUE WD10EZEX    1ea
500W Power supply
Realtek 8168E    3ea
Realtek 8169    1ea   
Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual port    1ea


System 3 (iSCSI Storage and vCenter Server)

Intel ivy-bridge i3-3220
Samsung DDR3 4G PC3-12800    4ea
GIGABYTE GA-H77-DS3H (built in Atheros AR8161 NIC)
Samsung 840 series EVO 500GB MZ-7TE500B    1ea
WD 1TB BLUE WD10EZEX    2ea
500W Power supply
Realtek 8168E    4ea
Realtek 8169    2ea



and recently, vSphere 5.5 was released. at this release, realtek NIC driver is not included.

so you must customize image yourself. of course customized realtek NIC driver(support cummunity level) has compatibility with vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.

Using this machine, I had have test Windows Server, Lync, Ubuntu Server and Cisco virtual machines. It works well so far now and It was good choice.


Good luck.