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Is it possible to use (some carefully selected) PC motherboard to build a machine that can run barebone hypervisor (ESXi)?

  1. If not, what is missing/different on PC boards compared to servers?

  2. If yes, what kind of properties this board must have? Integrated RAID, two NIC?

To present an example, there is SUPERMICRO X11SAE-M, €270 on my HW supplier list. It is stated as compatible with ESXi 6.0 (with Skylake processor only and not ESXi 7.0). The list of available MBs is overwhelming, so I need to narrow down the search somehow.

For background: the machine is for various testing and devops purposes in small software project where we use both Windows and Linux. It will be installed at home office, so the real server hardware is too loud, not to mention expensive. I do not need high reliability or any such datacenter-grade features. Just lots of SSD space and RAM. Water cooling to make it quiet.

I saw this question - informative, but it was few years ago.

EDIT: rephrased as hopefully less confusing

Congenital Optimist
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1 Answers1

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ESXi is... picky.

In practice the hardware compatibility list essentially means that it has been tested, and will definitely certainly work with that hardware configuration. If you are buying a licence - to some extent hardware support could be contingent on being supported

That does not mean that it will not run - it means that you could potentially have issues. For example, out of the box, some versions of ESXi don't support realtek NICs. You're going to find that most "regular" desktop PCs either have intel (which will work) or Realtek (which may not)

Is it possible to use (some carefully selected) PC motherboard to build a machine that can run barebone hypervisor (ESXi)?

Yes

If not, what is missing/different on PC boards compared to servers?

A proper server is going to have things like ECC, better/more IO and be designed to fit in a rack

If yes, what kind of properties this board must have? Integrated RAID, two NIC?

Well - a fairly common setup folks do for 'small' scale virtualisation is to throw ESXi onto a NUC or Mac Mini (for legal OS X VMs). So its less "Two NICs" or "Raid" than "Hardware with drivers that ESXi has bundled in"

In theory as long as ESXi supports the hardware you are using, you should be good. It just doesn't have as broad support as a mainstream desktop OS, and if you're running this in a full production setting, you don't want to beat things into working. You're trading off flexibility (in picking your own hardware) with the convenience of knowing someone else has previously installed and verified that this hardware will work perfectly on ESXi

I'd start with finding the hardware you want, going through the hardware and seeing if each component is supported. VMWare has a tool for this Your NICs should be fine off the top of my head.

Being on the compatibility list is a guarantee it will work on a specific ESXi build. "Non supported" hardware, explicitly not on the list may work with no extra effort, or may need slipstreaming of drivers and such.

Journeyman Geek
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