Network switch for my lab - Netgear GS724T-300

The last hardware upgrade on my vSphere lab was the SSD, but in addition to that I've been in need of a descent switch for a while.  What I wanted, was a Cisco 2960-S.  Not only are they good, but they're also my top-of-rack standard switch in my vSphere deployments.  However, in spite of diligently trolling Ebay looking for a deal, I decided to opt for a Netgear GS724T-300 for the home lab... which is a 24-port gigabit managed switch, supporting 802.1q VLAN tagging, link aggregation, etc.  Most of all, it's affordable at $219.  While not of any consequence in my environment, they're silent, which doesn't hurt.

vSPhere 4 on GA-EX58-UD3R

If you're looking to put together a vSphere whitebox, the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard with an Intel Core i7 920 isn't a bad choice. If you're thinking about going down this path - there are a few things worth mentioning... and while there's nothing particularly challenging or "show-stopping" about getting this working properly (except maybe the NIC), reading this post might save you some time.

Networking

You should know that the onboard Realtek RTL8168C NIC doesn't work - vSphere doesn't detect it. Ultimatewhitebox has a note about this, as do some forum posts... and sure enough, they're right. I found a few Intel PRO/1000 MT PCI Desktop Adapter's on eBay that work just fine, but if you're buying parts for this - go ahead and get a couple of the Intel NICs now. And you might want to consider disabling the onboard NIC during the setup.

Optical Drive

The takeaway here - make certain that your optical drive and SATA drive are on different channels. Also, if you want to avoid the below consider using a SATA optical drive instead of bothering with using an old IDE drive that you might have laying around.

Things to avoid...

I was using the eval version of vSphere 4 (4.0.0, 208167) on disc. The disc was detected on boot up, and I was able to get launch the vSphere GUI setup and get the installation started.

Initially, I was using an old IDE DVD drive. While the boot process went mostly as expected (with an odd exception sometime after the setup process started I had a message "CDROM Failed to Mount") I was able to get to the point in the setup where I had to create partitions. At that point, the setup process wasn't seeing my onboard SATA hard drive. So I rebooted, checked the BIOS and confirmed that the drive was being detected... I did happen to notice that it was on the same channel as the hard drive. After moving them to different channels, I launched the GUI setup again and when it got to the point of detecting the SATA hard drive, it was there. After seeing that, the setup process needs to copy some files off of the CD... which it suddenly failed to do... no drive detected. That seemed kind of strange, given that I had booted off the DVD drive, but recalling the CDROM failed to mount message - perhaps not. I went back into the BIOS, and changed the mode that the Optical drive was in - rebooted, but again failed to detect CD at the create partitions window. Next, I swapped in a SATA DVD writer from a different machine, launched the vSphere GUI setup (no more CDROM failed to mount message), detected the SATA hard drive, created partitions, and it completed setup without incident.

Overall, not too challenging for a Friday night... and now I have a vSphere host in my lab to start playing with.

Setup

vSphere 4 (4.0.0, 208167) disc

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R bios version FB

Intel Core i7 920 CPU

Realtek RTL8168C on-board NIC disabled

Intel PRO/1000 MT PCI Desktop Adapters

SATA DVD Writer (SH-S223)

Western Digital WD5000 Blue Label, 500GB 7200RPM SATA Drive
Update in 2012 - added a Intel 128GB SSD