I analyzed in a previous article which alternatives are available while designing our own home lab for VMware, and I ended up choosing the WhiteBox way. In the following weeks I looked through the products on the market, in order to find my own solution. I need to say thanks to my friend Luca Roman, co-owner of runstore.it, who helped me in choosing, searching and assembling the components.

The main component to be choosen is the motherboard/cpu combination. There is no motherboard that can host every cpu, and some choices of one of the two components influences the other.

My first choice has been the CPU, and I choose a AMD FX-6100. Is an ExaCore cpu at 3.3 ghz clock. The main reasons for choosing this were:

– 6 cores in a single socket allows a good vCPU/pCPU ratio at a fair price if compared to Intel; using whiteboxes, dual socket motherboards are too expensive, so a single proessor should be plenty of cores
– low power consumption: 95w vs Intel i7 Extreme Edition 6-core at 130w
– availability of AMD Cool’n’Quiet, nice for having low noise when running at home

The CPU choice was obviously temporary, since I needed to have a good motherboard for using this cpu. After some searches I picked a AS-Rock 970 Extreme4. These are the reasons:

– obviously the FX-6100 cpu is supported, but it also supports bigger CPUs. So in the future I will be able to install some of them (maybe with even more cores)
– it has 4 ram slots. Even if now it has 4gb module on each slot, it can reach 32 Gb of RAM when 8 Gb modules will become cheaper…
– It allows the use of IOMMU. This means I can use VMDirectPath on ESXi
– it has several PCI-E connectors, good for installing addon cards

I used the cheapest ATX case we found to lower down costs.

I installed the memory modules, and a 1Gb usb key I already had to install and run ESXi 5. I did not install any HDD to lower costs and also power consumtion.

Networking: since I would like to have a realistic production environment, I installed on my WhiteBox a Intel Pro1000 VT quad port gigabit ethernet, as you can see in the picture before the installation.
Together with the onboard nic (Realtek 8168 gigabit) identified by ESXi 5.0, I will have a total of 5 network uplinks to test teaming, failover, and manage storage network for iSCSI and NFS.

Finally, the price: the grand total was 449 EURO.