Build a low power, fanless hyper-visor host home server

Info & chat about quiet prebuilt, small form factor and barebones systems, people's experiences with vendors thereof, etc.

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mannin32
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 11:58 am
Location: Florida

Build a low power, fanless hyper-visor host home server

Post by mannin32 » Wed Oct 01, 2014 5:24 am

I want to build a VMware free edition EXSi host for home use. It would be primarily for testing, dev and other misc VM’s, nothing production. Most of the time I would use it with Linux servers but I'm sure I would have a Windows 7 desktop guest to mess around with too. I might setup one of the VM's to be a media server using Subsonic (http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp) and an external hard drive. Anyway I have a wall mount rack that would allow me to have a 16” deep server so it can’t be a normal rack mount box. The rack is in the master bedroom closet with my home automation equipment so I need it to be very quiet, preferably silent and low power. I was looking online at some of these fanless servers which I would buy except for the fact they are rather expensive and I can only find ones in the UK or Germany which would add cost due to shipping. I am not opposed to buying an assembled system just want to find the right machine. See links below.

https://www.deltatronic.de/en/19-rackmount-en
http://www.aleutia.com/products/m200-fanless-server
This is the rack I have, its the 19U
https://www.hammfg.com/dci/products/wall-mount/1459

Wish list:
Under $1000
Low power consumption
Silent operation, no moving parts, fanless
Quad core 64 bit (non server processor is fine)
8GB+ Ram 256-500GB SSD Rackmount case less than 16” deep
Multiple NIC’s
Rack mount anywhere between 1U to 4U, or a tower I can set on it's side inside the rack.
Front facing I/O ports (not important nice to have)
I would love builtin remote KVM (not important just nice to have)


mannin32
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 11:58 am
Location: Florida

Re: Build a low power, fanless hyper-visor host home server

Post by mannin32 » Wed Oct 01, 2014 6:10 am

I did see those but I was hoping to stay away from Intel Atom processors. Maybe those would be fine I don't know. My experience with Atom's has not been good but that was years ago.

Do you know how an Atom would do with ESXi?

Olaf van der Spek
Posts: 434
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 6:10 am

Re: Build a low power, fanless hyper-visor host home server

Post by Olaf van der Spek » Thu Dec 25, 2014 5:00 pm

Why 4+ cores and why 2+ network cards?

washu
Posts: 571
Joined: Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:20 am
Location: Ottawa

Re: Build a low power, fanless hyper-visor host home server

Post by washu » Thu Dec 25, 2014 7:11 pm

The newer Atom processors based on the Silvermont architecture are much faster than the old Bonnell based Atoms. The easiest way to think about them is comparable to core 2 CPUs in speed. The current Atom CPUs will do fine with ESXi.

That being said, once you are past a couple of VMs you are more likely to be I/O then RAM limited than CPU.

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