Ultimate White Box thoughts

Having an Idea for an Ultimate White Box? Or Multi-Usage Ultimate White Box. I'm thinking of building a new All in One White box. I'm quite tired of having all sort of white boxes which consumes energy when stays on all the time. I'd like to be more ECO human….. to consume less energy and be more efficient.

Update: A new system was born -:). This time I went for an architecture based on Intel Core i7-4930k with a motherboard supporting 64 Gb of RAM.

So having a system with lots of RAM makes sense as this box is transportable, I can do demos at the client’s sites or provide a training class for few students. You can do quite a lot with single box beefed with hexacore CPU, 64 Gb of RAM, and few nested ESXi….

Which usage?

• Portable lab for demos, training.
• As a home PC and entertainment box

Below, some older lab post.

At the moment at my home lab, its a very MIXED Virtual environment. Workstation and VMware vSphere.  I have 3 boxes. I'm using mostly for learning for the VCP or VCAP-DCA/DCD path, do some videos on the Windows 7 box too… So I have one box with ESX 4 installed, one with W7 and one with Openfiler.

I would like to OPTIMIZE all that and put everything into ONE new Nehalem box.  To build a white box supporting all that, I'm gonna go for Intel i7 processor. But what about the other parts?

Look at my present scheme:

Something like kekerode in coment section on Duncan's blog would be interresting:

DFI LP UT X58
Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.6GHz OCed
3 x 2GB OCZ Reaper DDR3 1866MHz (going to add 6GB more of it)
2 x WD Raptor 300GB RAID-0

Only difference is that for NAS … I use one more VM of Openfiler

My conditions – to have all in one box. Be able to do some video editing, … So I want to keep Windows 7 as an Os (since I have some Windows applications I need) for that with VMware Workstation installed. All the rest would be run in Virtual.

Concerning the Storage, there would be interesting to start using SSD's. I know that they're still pricey, but I've read a good article on Clubic.com (Fr), that review the latest Kingston SSD -SSDNow V+ G2 . Kingston got married to Toshiba which produces the controller cards – Daikoku 2 (DKK2) – compatible natively Windows 7 – to get the TRIM functionality to work with the Kingston's SSD's since they apparently never got that Intel Firmware from Intel for the v1 when they worked together with Intel.

And as you know the Trim functionality is quite crucial on the SSD's since they tend to loose performance at a long term run. (unless you format – that's also possible, in a lab environment. Just backup all VM”s present there and here you go..)

And the results of their tests, they are very good. Not only in read but also in write. It makes the classic hard disks way too old. Just use Google Translate to translate the whole article there….The model tested is the Kingston SSDNow V+ enterprise class SSD.

See the Write 512Ko file….

Openfiler VM, or Starwind SAN could be my shared storage on that SSD drive. Sure the capacity is not great (only 64 or 128 Gigs to keep the price at a reasonable level ), but the fastest most demanding VMs could be stored there…. What's your opinion on that?  How much FAST storage do you ABSOLUTELY need? You do have now mixed enterprise class SAN storages too, so this would be an idea doing the same – in smaller – for a homelab…:-D

I'm living at Tropical Island where the efforts in energy efficiency and energy economy is becoming the mainstream.

For example with the recent visit of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy at Reunion Island, they're launching a new program here. There will be Renault ZE – providing 50 electric cars to be tested here on the island. I wrote a whole article about that on my Solar Blog too. The whole infrastructure with the charging stations – by photovoltaics and Wind – will be built.

So for me, my way is clearly NOT to multiple white boxes in my lab but to do exactly the opposite way. Built a MutiUsage Whitebox.

I'm waiting for your reactions and thoughts. Feel free and use the comment section or Twitter. @Vladan

You can have a look at this follow-up post where I'm actually thinking what to put into this White Box.