Affordable wall mount ESX 5.5 Cluster

Affordable wall mount ESX 5.5 Cluster.

I have been through several iterations of home ESX setups, but finally found what I consider the best compromise: quiet, performance and afford-ability.  The only moving parts in this setup are the 2 Seagate hard drives and (very quiet) cooling fan mounted in the Synology device.

Yes the cables look like crap.  This is a working lab, where I make changes and rebuilds.  Neater cables make this difficult.  You can make your own with highly managed cables and show me up.  Feel free.

A home ESX cluster can be very handy for testing, hosting web services, game servers, or anything that you want to play with yet have good reliability and passable performance for home use.

Here is a list of hardware:
-ECS Mini ITX form factor motherboards for space savings.  (Fanless, $30  after rebate each)
-Celeron G1620 Dual Core CPUs ($45 each)
-Arctic Cooling CPU heatsink.  Fan removed.  These are so overkill for the Celerons that they do not get hot even without cooling fans. ($20 each)
-PicoPsu for sleek look and no noise. ($30 each.  Amazon is a good source)
-16 gigs RAM per ESX Host ($50 each)
-Trendnet Green 8 port unmanaged 1 gigabit network switch ($30)
-Intel Pro 2 Port Gigabit nic ($50 each)
-8 gig USB flash drive for ESX to be installed onto ($10 each)
-Synology DS212j iSCSI capable NAS.  These things are workhorses.  ($150)
-2x Segate 7200 RPM 3TB hard drives operating as mirror in the Synology $80
-2TB USB Portable drive for Synology backups ($70)
-Belkin Powerstrip ($15)
-1/2 inch plywood.  Sanded and painted gloss black with spray paint
-APC UPS (Not pictured)

Total Damage for this setup: $735


Pictured but not involved in ESX work here is a Banana Pi running IPFire Firewall OS and the external Dlink USB Nic is for the IPFire Red interface that is coming from my ISP modem.  I am on 10 mgabit internet service, so the USB Nic is not a bottleneck here.  The Banana Pi has a 1 gig onboard Nic for the green interface.


Wall mounting allows for easy viewing, air cooling, cheapness, cables managed, and no floor space consumed.  The CPU heatsinks get barely warm to the touch even when the CPUs are working very hard.  As a failsafe, the BIOS is configured to shut down the systems if the CPU were to overheat.

This thing runs 24 hours a day, so power consumption is worth considering.  I typically run only a single ESX host for day to day operations.  I crank up the 2nd host if I need to do maintenance, ESX updates or need to do some work that consumes large amounts of RAM or CPU.
This config (1 host shut down) consumes less than 75 watts of power during normal operation.

Lets talk about the Synology, as it is the backbone of this operation and my entire home network.  This device is affordable at $150 without drives and is nearly limitless in its capability.  Even more features than free solutions like Freenas. (Which I ran for a few years as an iSCSI target too.)
Here is why Synology is better than Freenas: With Freenas, you can either do iSCSI datastore work OR the Windows shared file hosting, FTP server, and the other cool stuff Freenas can do.  This is the main problem with Freenas in my mind.
With Synology, you can do an iSCSI Target as well as have Windows file sharing, rsync, ssh, surveillance system, and every other feature that is available on this device.  (And their are tons!)  Including an app store with apps that I use on mine like Bittorrent sync, couch potato, sabnzbd, sickbeard, and Amazon Glacier Backup.
I have mine configured with 1TB allocated as an iSCSI datastore for the ESX hosts and 2TB configured as a Synology volume for Synology to do Windows file sharing and all of its other features from.
Performance is passable. It is not stunning, but it does an excellent job of running my VMs via iSCSI as well as streaming 1080p movies from its windows share to my Plex server and Boxee and all of the other stuff it can do.  My unit is near bottom of the barrel as far as CPU and RAM.  There are several Synology devices to choose from, most having better specs than mine.

VMs currently running full time:
-Windows Home Server 2011 for set it and forget it backups of Windows workstations
-Server 2008r2 for vCenter update manager database and VI Client that I access via RDP from my Linux Mint primary workstation.  Mint is 64 Bit and does not like the ESX 5.5 web interface because of 64 bit Linux and Flash incompatibilities.
-vCenter 5.5 appliance
-Ubuntu Server for Nessus scanning
-Ubuntu Server for Splunk log gathering and reporting
-Ubuntu Server for Plex that connects to the SMB share on the Synology where my media is stored
-Ubuntu Server for Splunk log gathering and searching
-Vmware Data Recovery sending backups to a Synology windows share that are then backed up to the USB drive weekly.



Here are more pictures of my setup in a previous iteration:

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