Since it’s becoming such a large portion of my life, I’m building out a vSphere lab box to experiment on without running the risk of breaking my customer’s production site. It’s been a heck of a project getting stuff that will work with VMware’s HCL. But I think I’ve got it nailed down. Here’s the bill of materials:

• Xeon E3-1235 quad core CPU
• Asus P8B-WS motherboard
• 32 gigs of RAM
• 8 gig CF card + SATA adapter for the VMware boot drive
• LSI MegaRaid 9260-4i RAID card with battery backup for the write cache
• 4 x 1.5 terabyte drives for a RAID-5 VMFS volume
• 500 watt 80+ bronze rated modular power supply

I had a good case and CD/DVD drive laying around, so I’m reusing them to keep costs down a little. Everything should be in early next week. Then I can start building it and making sure everything does work with vSphere. If not, who knows, I may end up with a pretty amazing hackintosh…