Hosted by Darren Kitchen and Shannon Morse. New episodes Tuesdays.
Put together by a band of IT ninjas, security professionals and hardcore gamers, Hak5 isn't your typical tech show. We take on hacking in the old-school sense, covering everything from network security, open source and forensics, to DIY modding and the homebrew scene. Then we wrap it all up with a... Read More
Building the ultimate white box ESXi server for under $2000! Can it be done? Darren and Matt grab the company credit card and answer that question.
When it comes to building a white box server for ESXi your best resources are vm-help.com, UltimateWhiteBox.com, the VMware Compatibility Guide, and the VMware community.
We carefully selects ESXi supported components based on reliability and value. If this were the ultimate $3000 white box server we might have picked a server board with dual Xeon's and ECC memory, but to keep it under that magic $2000 price point we went with beefy "desktop" components such as the Intel Core i7 920, the ASUS P6T Deluxe, and 12 GB of Corsair XMS3 memory.
Drive wise you can't go wrong with the 3ware 9650SE-4LPML. It supports four SATA II drives in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD. It's bigger brother the 9650SE-16ML sixteen channel SATA II controller is hot too -- just at three times the price. The 9650SE isn't supported out of the box by ESXi, however 3ware provides a knowledge base article and drivers necessary to add support for the card after your ESXi box is built.
Drive wise we picked up four Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives since they're cheap and reliable.
To make things easy when installing all these components in our Rosewill RSV-Z4000 4U rackmount case we picked up a 4 Drive trayless how swap sata backplane from StarTech. IcyDock makes one too. This was the only $100 spent for convenience over performance/value, but anyone who has dealt with 5.25" to 3.5" mounting brackets will agree it's worth every penny.
Rather than installing ESXi on the RAID, we used a 4GB USB drive from Patriot. The Xporter XT. It boasts really fast read/write times. I'm sure any old 1gb or larget USB drive would have done but they're so cheap, why not?
We're doing a little white box server contest. Winners will get all sorts of swag from the Hak5 Store. Check out all the details in the episode release thread at Hak5.org
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Employers want social media passwords, US gets a #CPO, and #TheOnion! All that and more this time on #ThreatWire! http://t.co/SrZpicvnt6
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13 days ago
@thescribe I didn't! They were disabled and enabled throughout the segment. Each one has a different icon. - @Snubs
13 days ago
@myraitnetwork thank you!
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#PGP #Encrypt your email, back up your #Gmail Account with #Ubuntu, text #messaging your #WiFi #Pineapple On #Hak5! http://t.co/KSZeO4GEPU
