For a couple of months I’m searching for an extra whitebox host for extending my home lab environment. My current lab whitebox is a Haswell based whitebox (see: link). Here is an overview of the new lab environment: For the new whitebox I had the following requirements: Hardware such as NICs must be …
Continue ReadingI was searching for a new whitebox for my home lab. I had the following requirements for the new whitebox: Low power consumption for 24x7 running >16 GB memory Expansion slots for PCI(-E) cards Good performance Low noise A couple of weeks ago Intel released the new 4th generation Haswell CPUs …
Continue ReadingMy new Gigabyte Z87-D3HP motherboard with support for 4th Generation Intel® Core™ processors (codename Haswell) has a onboard Intel I217-V NIC. The NIC is not recognized and supported in Windows Server 2012. As with the “Enable the Intel 82579V NIC in Windows Server 2012 ” blogpost it is possible to …
Continue ReadingI have a lab at home to test for example VMware vSphere and Microsoft stuff. Running your home lab for 24/7 will result in a high electricity bill. For a couple of months I use the Internet Control Station ICS-1000 (ICS-1000) to power on my home lab when needed from anywhere. The ICS-1000 controls …
Continue ReadingIn an earlier blog post (found here ) I mentioned that it is time for a new homebrew whitebox based on the Intel X79 chipset. With the X79 chipset it is possible to install 64GB of memory (8 x 8 GB). Because the 8 GB DIMMs are expensive on the moment, I decided to use 8 x 4GB DIMMs (total 32GB). I …
Continue ReadingI tested the NICs below in my VMware ESXi 5.x whitebox server at home. Here the status: NICRecognized by VMware ESXi 5Listed in ESXi 5 asIntel PRO/1000GT Desktop Adapter PCIYesIntel 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet ControllerRealtek RTL 8111EYesRealtek 8168 Gigabit EthernetIntel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter …
Continue ReadingWhen using a whitebox lab environment at home and like to test for example vSphere 5, vCloud Director, VMware View and MS Hyper-V (nested in VMware vSphere you need a lot of processor power and memory. In almost all whitebox lab environment the processor power is not the problem but the amount of …
Continue ReadingIf you want a low power consumption whitebox motherboard to run some VMs that are not resource intensive the Asus E35M1-M PRO Zacate motherboard is an option. It has an AMD E-350 dual core 1,6 GHz processor with passive cooling, onboard graphics, max 8GB memory support, onboard LAN and 5x SATA 6 …
Continue ReadingA couple of weeks ago my desktop PC died, so my girlfriend could not read there e-mail. I decide to turn my OLD VMware ESX test server into a Microsoft Vista workstation and buy a new whitebox. After searching the internet and comparing components, I found the following configuration: CoolerMaster …
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