Cheap VMware ESX Server - Part 2

The parts arrived from newegg this week. As with any computer assembly, the first step is to lay everything out and take an inventory to see if anything is missing. Here's the stack of parts laid out on the kitchen table.


The next step was to prepare the drawer with some ventilation. I decided to try a single 80mm intake fan mounted onto the back of the drawer with an intake hole cut through the thin cardboard on the back of the ikea cabinet. The fan is mounted on the back of the drawer so it sticks out through the back of the cabinet when the drawer is closed. This ensures you are drawing in cold outside air. I held the fan to the back of the drawer and used a pencil to mark the screw locations and the air hole. A dremel with the drill and routing tools worked fairly well to finish the wood working. Here's a few pictures of the finished drawer with the 80mm fan mounted in back.


Now comes the fun part; putting everything together. I tried to keep the heat-producing components along a straight line between the front of the drawer, which I plan to leave cracked for heat exhaust, and the intake fan at the rear of the cabinet to provide optimum air flow. I added a temporary CD-ROM for the OS installation. While the motherboard has onboard SATA ports, you will need to be sure to connect your hard drives to the SAS ports or the ESX installer won't be able to locate the disks.


Once everything is in place, temporarily connect a VGA cable and a keyboard for the initial setup. Unless you have a power button to use, carefully use a screwdriver to short the two power pins on the front panel to power on the server. I like to boot into BIOS first to give everything a quick look over and change any settings. At a minimum, ensure the motherboard correctly identifies your processor type and memory quantity. If not, you may need to flash the BIOS. I also set the BIOS to default to power on after a power loss. This means if the power goes out for some reason, the system will start right back up. Now is also a good time to set the temp and fan speed warnings so your server won't overheat and damage itself inside the drawer. Once everything in BIOS checks out, boot to the SAS RAID manager and create your array. Be sure to make it bootable. Boot to the ESX installation CD and verify the installer can see the local drive.

Now that ESX is installed, your lab server is ready to go!

On a final note, the single intake fan wasn't enough to keep the drawer cool. I noticed that the intake fan wasn't running at full speed while connected to the motherboard, so I attached it directly to the power supply using an adapter. This helped a little, but still not enough as the ambient temp inside the drawer was peaking at 110 F under idle conditions. In the mean time, I'm going to run the server with the drawer cracked a few inches. I'm hoping to add another fan this weekend to solve the problem.

Cheap VMware ESX Server - Part 1