ESXi on a MSI 6676-003BUS Intel Atom D510

[VinylxScratches]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856167042

Do you think I could get by on this running 3 servers?

It'd be Windows Server 2008 AD, Debian DNS, and Debian DHCP.

I'd like to do this 2x for redundancy but low power usage.

Basically what I want to do is create my own test environment...

Any ideas?

 

[mfenn]

Does ESXi run without VT-x? If so, then you should be fine, it's just going to be quite slow.

 

[somethingsketchy]

Not really, most atom processors (that I'm aware of) don't support VT-x instructions. And as mfenn has alluded to, it would be quite slow. Probably not even worth it, just for AD.

Might work for DHCP and DNS, but I'd doubt it would work with AD...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/system-requirements.aspx

...you would need a 64-bit processor to use the 2008 version of AD. You might be able to use Windows Server 2003, but not 2008. Best bet would be to build a low-power 45nm machine around such a processor (something like one of these VT-capable processors...)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...e=&srchInDesc=

Hope that helps

 

[RebateMonger]

Hardware and firmware requirement for 64-bit OSes - 5/24/10:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003945

"Intel CPUs require EM64T and VT support in the chip and in the BIOS."

The Atoms seem to have Passmark CPU benchmarks in the 350-400 range. That's equivalent to a later P4. I've run Hyper-V with the Celeron E3300 and E6300, both of which have VT and Passmark scores around 1500.

You could likely go lower than those, which seemed more than adequate. I used to run multiple Server 2003 virtual machines on a P4 2.2 GHz with 1 GB of memory. That was pretty slow.

I don't think I'd go Atom, even if it did have VT. I have nothing against the Atom, but it's likely underpowered for any real work as a virtual server host.

 

[mfenn]

Hardware and firmware requirement for 64-bit OSes - 5/24/10:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003945

"Intel CPUs require EM64T and VT support in the chip and in the BIOS."

The Atoms seem to have Passmark CPU benchmarks in the 350-400 range. That's equivalent to a later P4. I've run Hyper-V with the Celeron E3300 and E6300, both of which have VT and Passmark scores around 1500. You could likely go lower than those, which seemed more than adequate.

So in that case the D510 is a no-go because it doesn't have VT-x.