[moltuae]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

Installing ESXi did not go to plan it wanted at least 4GB of RAM but with 4GB installed there is only 3.84 available. I will update RAM in the future but just want to get it up and running at the moment. I do not really need ESXi as I don't need to run several virtual servers anyway so might go for 5th HDD in ODD bay as I have several 2.5" HDD's lying around just need to get power cable adaptor from FDD to SATA.

I used VMware's offering for years. These days I'm doing more with Hyper-V. In Server 2008 it was somewhat lacking but since the 2012 release, it's become a very mature and stable product.

This is what you need .... some serious server power (notice the 24 logical processors and 72GB of RAM)



This is a setup I've been working recently on for a business customer. There are 4 servers in the group: 2 of them are of the spec you can see in the screenshot and the other 2, which only have 12GB of RAM each, are running the free Hyper-V 2012 R2 'core' OS (but can be managed from any of the full Server 2012 R2 Standard installations). The best thing about MS Hyper-V is how you can 'live-migrate' VMs from one physical server to another with zero downtime. I also have some of the VMs configured for replication such that, if one server dies, I can quickly power-up VM clones on another server in the group.