• Cheap – Less than $800 shipped.
• Quiet – Doesn’t need to be whisper quiet, as I have it in my bedroom closet / wiring closet. But, I don’t want it to sound like a jet engine taking off every time I want to use it.
• Energy-Friendly – I already have to pay to cool a house in Texas in the summer 24/7, having a huge server won’t help lower those bills any.
• FULLY Compatible with VMWare ESX – So I know there are solutions out there where people are compiling unsupported SCSI/SAS/SATA controller drivers into a custom kernel, but I want this to be supported out of the box.

So, the hardest part of this was going to be finding the right motherboard / chip combo. VMWare ESX requires that the VMFS volumes be on a validated SAS/SCSI/SATA controller. I could go with a standard motherboard and then buy a supported controller off Newegg or Ebay, but even those are going for $200-$300 for just the card. Ideally, I could find a motherboard with SAS onboard. After some research, I ended up going with the ASUS P5BV/SAS from Newegg. It supported Core2 Duo / Quad-core processors, and it has a LSI 1068 chipped SAS controller built in. For those of you not familiar with SAS, it’s the new generation of SCSI, and it’s backwards compatible (in most cases) with SATA drives. This means that I can put cheap SATA drives on it (even in RAID if I wanted to) and fool VMWare into meeting the correct volume requirements.

The next issue was finding a chip that supports the Intel VT instruction set to allow 64-bit Guest OS VMs. I referenced the motherboard compatibility list and the excellent Wikipedia article, and landed on the Intel Core 2 Duo E6550.

Now, I just had to add in how much memory I wanted (4GB at least), a case, a DVD drive, and a good SATA2 disk drive. The summary is as follows:

1. Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550 – Retail $159.99
2. ASUS P5BV/SAS LGA 775 Intel 3200 ATX Server Motherboard – Retail $269.99 (Though I got one for $209.99 with an open box.)
3. CORSAIR XMS2 DHX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX – Retail $109.00
4. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3750330AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM $129.99
5. Rosewill R604TBLK-N 120mm Fan ATX Mid Tower Computer Case+450W Power Supply – Retail $59.99 (This actually turned out to be quite a nice case for the money.)
6. LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model DH-20A4P-04 – OEM $22.99

TOTAL – $751.95

The build process was easy as could be. I actually tossed in a second SATA 80 GB SATA drive that I had on-hand to use for the ESX Console OS and Template Repository. That way, I could use the 750 GB for VMs exclusively.

For VMWARE I used the eval version and setup the VirtualCenter as a VM itself. Not pretty, but it works just fine.

Now, there are other ways to do this. One of the other validated SCSI/SAS/SATA methods is to use VMWare’s built-in software iSCSI initiator. Couple that with a real nice free iSCSI target OS like FREENAS, and you can use just about any old machine you have lying around (as long as it supports the VT extension). You could even get two boxes together and setup a FREENAS iSCSI target to share amongst them and play around with VMWare DRS / HA / Vmotion.

***ADDITIONAL***
Some really great articles of other people doing the same thing:
http://www.vmweekly.com/articles/cheap-esx-server-hardware/1/
http://www.techhead.co.uk/building-a-low-cost-cheap-vmware-esx-test-server
This guy found the same motherboard:
http://www.mikechammock.com/2008/06/cheap-vmware-esx-server.html