Comments on: Episode 519 – Building the Ultimate White Box for under $2000

By: Bill Lee

Bill Lee — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:29:00 +0000

You were singing the praises of the Asus P6T motherboard… I was wondering what sets this board apart from others and makes you such a fan?

Thanks,
Bill…

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:47:09 +0000

Good thing for archived show notes. I’m going to be using this as a guide to build, instead of a VM server, a backup server. Throw a bunch of 1TB drives in there, go a bit less on the mobo/proc/ram combo and have a nice box with a crapton of storage to throw backup files on.

By: smith

smith — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Very informative episode on EXSi.

Would you do a followup on your experiences with the box now that it is in production.

What proplems you may have encountered.

What you might have done differently?

Sort of the pros/cons of doing a box in this manner.

I am now building a box similar to this one and such information would be very valuable.

Thank you for the great episode.

By: Question

Question — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:19:15 +0000

And never mind I jumped the gun, just found the forums page….. thanks!

By: Question

Question — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:16:32 +0000

Hi,

Great Episode! But I was wondering what you used for a power supply? Off the cuff it does not look like the case came with on and the details about the episode did not list one…. Just wondering.

By: Glitch

Glitch — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:08:59 +0000

Very nice.

By: Darren Kitchen

Darren Kitchen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:29:02 +0000

The song during the build was one off Pronobozo’s Zero = One = Everything album. You can find it at http://www.pronobozo.com

By: DarrenB

DarrenB — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:32:54 +0000

What, not using ECC memory in a server? That could come back to byte you in the future.

I think people underestimate the level of soft bit errors that occurs in non-ECC memory, especially in a box that is being aggresively used in a server environment. A soft-bit error is a bit-flip that occurs randomly that otherwise is undetectable as a hard error with tools like memtest86, etc.

I learnt my lesson earlier this year and now believe that with increased memory density, that the probabity for a soft bit error occuring in RAM is similar to the increase in the probability of HDD failures as HDD densities have increased. We all accept for HDD’s, the statement of “It’s not a question of if it will fail, it’s a question of when?”, and as such the case of HDD failure is so accepted now, that in any serious scenario RAID is a defacto consideration for handling the “expected” HDD failure. I trust that soon the same scenario for RAM will eventually transpire, empathsizing the need for ECC RAM.

So, in the end why use RAID with the HDD’s, but not use ECC RAM?

By: Dan Jeffrey

Dan Jeffrey — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:08:28 +0000

Do you ever use the on-board RAID included with the mobo? I assume there are good reasons not to — otherwise 3ware would not be in business.

Is expansion card RAID faster than on-board RAID?

Is on-board RAID less reliable?

By: TheFu

TheFu — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:41:19 +0000

Possibly the best episode of any tech video team ever. Seriously. This was exactly what someone new to ESXi needed to know. Excellent HW choices too. You don’t have to buy HP or Dell servers when you’re a small company with non-critical requirements.

VMware stuff is excellent for Microsoft or mixed MS/something else shops.

I’m looking forward to a few non-VMWare episodes. VirtualBox, Xen, Parallels, LPAR, NPAR, VPAR, Domains, and “Containers”.

I work in a 100% Linux server shop with only Xen VMs on production machines. We use VMware for Windows Dev systems and whenever a customer demands it, but avoid it for all other uses. There are many, many uses for VMs and SANs beyond the normal obvious uses. These methods are useful across all the different VM solutions, regardless of platform. Perhaps an episode on those techniques would be useful?

Keep up the excellent work!

By: XS

XS — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:09:06 +0000

First time watching the show! And what can I say… I am sooo addicted to it now! Keep up the great work!

Thanks a lot Matt for not telling me you had this show sooner! LOL