Before ESXi was released as a free product I’ve run the full blown version on an old HP Desktop for testing purposes which quite a few people used to run ESX 3.5 on and just reinstalling the product every 60 days. The main disadvantage was it’s powerconsumption with the P4 2.x – 3.x processor in there. Mine ran close to 100W continuesly. Until then I was running two MiniITX based systems which each consumed about 45W~50W each, but both of them getting close to three years of running time (continuesly). And as this one was supposed to run continuesly as well I thought it would be nice to cut down on power consumption by building a new solution but didn’t want to spend too much. I wanted to keep the budget below € 500,– for something that will last me hopefully three years, this was less then what I spend on the previous MiniITX solution. After investigating what was supported by VMWare and what was on stock at my favourite IT shop I decided on the following:

Asus Vintage V2-P5G33 barebone which supports up to 8Gb of memory and has a ICH9 SATA chipset, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 Ghz processor, a 1Tb Samsung drive and 2*2Gb of memory (added 2*1Gb which I already had) and as the onboard networkcard was not supported a 1Gb Intel network card. Well within the set budget.

After piecing it together migrating the domain from the two previous servers and the HP Desktop adding a few other virtual machines which came from the existing ESX Desktop I looked at the power consumption which was about ~85W. It will not return itself through the electricity bill but I’ve got something that will run for the next three years again. Just in time as one of the MiniITX boxes finally caved in as the power supply died and the processor fan was making noise. The other one will be converted into a backup solution later on.