I was hunting for a new affordable whitebox all pieced together for me, IE a desktop that was inline with the HCL. I looked through Best Buy since they usually have decent deals and went to my local CompUSA store to scope things out. I ended up buying a Gateway DX4860 from Best Buy for just a bit over 600 with tax included.
What you get:
i5 Quad 2.8ghz CPU 8gb RAM(Max 16gb) 1tb Hard Drive 6 SATA Ports Realtek 100/1000 NIC(Now supported during stock installation!)
Jason, I recently purchased the same PC in hopes of making it my ESXi 5 server. I was able to install ESXi5 with no issues, but it doesn’t seem to want to grab an IP address. Is the Realtek Gigabit NIC unsupported? I’ve tried statically assigning it an address and no luck with that either. Any thoughts?
Link | November 27th, 2011 at 7:21 pm
The NICs are supported now in vSphere 5, unlike 4. I used mine for a bit for low-end work without issue, the only downside to using that NIC is the lack of Jumbo Frames support, otherwise it should work out of box. Not sure why you are having issues.
Link | November 27th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Thanks for your help! When you say vsphere5, youre talking about ESXi 5 right? Ive never actually installed this before but ive use vmware VI for work to manage our datacenter. Im trying to setup a test environment at home so i can study for the VCP exam.
Link | November 27th, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Yes vSphere = ESXi to an extent, marketing terms. After looking, I was planning on getting another one, it appears Best Buy is selling a slightly newer model, perhaps there is a hardware change, I currently have a Realtek 8168 chipset, is that what you have?
Link | November 27th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Yep, that’s the one I have. Intel i5, 8GB ram, 1TB HDD. I restarted it a few times and now it’s grabbing an IP address, but not one from my subnet. I think I’ll try putting another NIC card in and see what happens.
Link | November 27th, 2011 at 9:38 pm
I was finally able to get it to grab an IP after it sat with DHCP turned on for a while. I set it the address it grabbed to static and it worked for a while. I was able to install the Virtual Infrastructure client and connect to the ESXi host. Now, I’m having a connectivity issue again with it not responding to a ping. I’m suspecting that the NIC is probably bad? Thanks for your help. As soon as I get my whitebox solution fully functional, I hope to write some wicked powerCLI scripts to automate some of my vm tasks.
Link | November 28th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Everything is setup and working perfectly! Time to kick back, open a beer, and start diving into PowerCLI.
http://todaystech.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/vmware-esxi-5-whitebox/
Link | November 29th, 2011 at 12:40 am