Wesley Levels's Blog

A couple weeks ago I was looking for a solution to have a nice NAS solution at home. In stead of buying a Synology or Conceptronic NAS with some minor performance problems (because of them not having enough memory) I got the idea of creating my own NAS with SAMBA, OpenFiler or FreeNAS. Eventually, my idea of buying a NAS blowed up to the point where I wanted an ESXi server at home.

Because of traditional rackservers being expensive and noisy, I looked for a compatible towerserver for ESXi, however VMware isn’t easy when it comes to finding a compatible server.
I found a website named vm-help.com that has much info about ESXi whiteboxes (meaning a system not officially supported but perfectly able to run ESXi). Check this site if you are thinking about building your own ESXi server for a far better price than a supported vendor-server.
I also created a bootable ESXi USB-stick (which would be a little bit faster). Check this site for creating a bootable ESXi USB-stick.

Soon I will post the setup I used.