ESX 3.5 on a whitebox

It has been very quiet from my end for the past weeks because I was very busy at a client & at the same time spending all my free time working on my ESX-on-whitebox hardware project. After being inspired by some colleagues, I decided to order the following hardware:

• Asus P5BP-E/4L motherboard
  This motherboard supports an Intel S775 processor, has VGA and audio onboard and most importantly, the LAN controllers on this motherboard are ESX certified (Broadcom 57xx chipset).
  
  
• Intel Q6600 Quad Core processor (2.4 GHz) and 8 GB ECC RAM (4x 2GB)
  Just to be sure I have enough CPU power and memory resource pools :)
  
  
• Dell Perc 5i Integrated SAS Controller
  My colleagues advised me that storage was the biggest bottleneck in their ESX whiteboxes (based around the very nice Asus P5M2/SAS board). I decided to go for a dedicated hardware controller. I picked up the Dell Perc 5i controller, which is more or less a rebranded LSI Logic 8408 SAS controller on EBay with 256MB of RAM and a battery backup unit for about 175 EUR.
  
  The main advantage of SAS controllers is that they also support the (cheaper) SATA consumer drives. A quick test confirmed this; I had absolutely no problems at all with this controller & even flashed the latest LSI Logic firmware to it :).
  
  Maybe of interest for some: the later Dell firmwares and also the later LSI logic firmwares for this controller provide support for Write Back without a BBU present.
  
  
• SATA to SAS cables
  The Dell Perc 5i has SFF-8484 SAS connectors on board, so I purchased two Adaptec SFF-8484 to 4xSATA cables from a nearby store to attach all the drives.
  
  
• 8 Seagate SATA harddisks (4x 1TB and 4x 200GB)
  Space... loads of space.

The hardest thing was getting all these disks in my Silentmaxx ST11 casing; it required some case modding and loads of patience to get everything well fitted. The 500W PSU that is necessary to provide enough juice, was recycled from an Antec Sonata case. I also added a small 3Com 3C905 100Mbps card for my ISP modem connection.

The installation of ESX 3.5 was a piece of a cake & and I can confirm that the above hardware works like a charm. For those interested, I also noticed that ESX 3.5 supports the ICH7 SATA controllers (found on many consumer motherboards as well). I think -- but this has to be confirmed by someone else -- that you need to configure your ICH7 disks in a RAID before the ESX kernel will accept them as a storage pool.