Is this box suitable for virtualization?
620374
I have mine setup with Oracle VM Virtualbox, on Debian. At the moment I only have one virtual machine, but I can run the Debian desktop easily with the VM running. I will add another VM, but I think you have to be realistic with the amount of memory available and a single processor.
620375
I've run Hyper-V on this box, but I would not recommend. Limited RAM & CPU for much more than small biz server. But for a desktop for personal VMs, it's a good solid box. I upgraded the ram and added HD. You'll want to have your OS of choice on a bootable USB drive as there is no DVD drive in the base config.
1029916
I doubt you could directly to the machine, since drivers are certainly going to be an issue. However, Windows 8 pro and enterprise can install hyper-v virtualization and since the drivers on that can be old school, I've gotten XP to install on that. The gotcha on this plan is if you have hardware dongles for communications or licenses, that don't always work.
418295
Its fine for a typical middle powered htpc. Most people aren't putting top of the line graphics cards and processors in an htpc enclosure. Its designed to be quiet not for massive over clocks.
826775
You should have no issues running ESXi on this. You would have to by an actual dedicated RAID card though as the on board is a fake RAID and probably isn't supported by ESXi.
370703
This is as close to a desktop as you can get with a laptop(well Falcon but pricier). This should easily handle everything you listed. I would suggest a solid state drive as well if you are concerned about power and speed.
438702
I do not know. I have not tried it. On the surface, it seems like an Ideal choice. Pleas read the response from a reviewer and check with the Mobo Manufacturer. Awsome board for a HTPC By N. R. on June 7, 2013 Verified Purchase This board is special, which is quite small, faster than an Atom board, have lower power usage than regular board + CPU, quiet even with the cpu fan, fits into 1u case with ease. If you find a good brand solid wattage above 120 watt small size. I have a slim size case with 140Watt and that did work fine. For a dual core, dual channel memory, cheap price I cannot complain. Pay attention some have issues with lesser wattage or not accurate PSU wattage given. The negative part is for errors on Linux installation. I want to use it for video, audio and Electronics books storage library mainly for low power consumption which is between 20-25 watt constant, but didn't expect I will have issue with Linux ACPI drivers which this one does. I switched to windows home server which works but did prefer the Linux as for it's great scalability. Hopefully you will have better luck than me.
2217872
Very real. I run VirtualBox on this laptop with no trouble! Of course, virtual machines can not use more than about 900MB of RAM on this machine (I use 256MB with a FreeBSD virtual machine, but 900MB is good enough for OpenSuSE or Debian/Ubuntu using XFCE. Never tried GNOME, KDE, etc...)
1502799
You can set up pfsense as a virtual machine on a esxi server, i can vouch for that working.
1640187
It depends on what type of setup your trying to do. If it's for data you should be fine.
2207814
Depends on your application. The apps that the synology box supports are great. Think email, surveillance, plex, or your own personal cloud accessible from anywhere.
1444189
Yes it should be able run this quad NIC in windows 7, I have it in my win 7 ultimate 64 bit I use my desktop as a VM server when running my labs. It should do just fine for media streaming since you can link all ports in LAGP but you won't have the desired performance if your switch that your system is connected to does not support link aggregation. This NIC is intended for VM server use and SAN use for VM data storage so media streaming will not be a problem.
2035796
I have a 1TB drive in it currently hosting my VMware ESXi Server. And it has I believe 3 or 4 sata ports on the mother board if I remember correctly. Because I have an sata dvd drive and two hdds in it currently with one other sata port available if I remember correctly.
2080194
That should not be a problem where the hardware is concerned. However, keep in mind your partitioning scheme. You will want to do a GPT partition table (as opposed to MSDOS partition table) with any partitions over 2TB. How you go about that will depend on the OS that you are using.
152359
Yes, that (Intel Core i7-3770K is exactly what I used. For me, now I use it to launch Virtual Machines both Oracle VirtualBox and VMWare and I have no problem at all. It is actually extremely fast and reliable even without overclocking at all - the motherboard can do it easily. I was able to overclock to 4.2 GHz without special cooling fan and running very stable. - R.
1581669
You could load balance traffic and provide redundancy using two switches. In case of vmware load balancing traffic is critical.
1418597
I currently have the server setup as a RDP server or Terminal Server where 30 call center agents are accessing it with a thin client. I do not think it has required hardware to go with virtual pcs. I think it's lacking the hyper v processor that would be required to do that. I hope this answer helps.
493713
Concur this is not a gaming server. Potential is you were using is as a gaming server, but even then doubtful it would be would be what you want. I use it to host esxi with virtual machines for Solaris, WIndows XP, WIndows 7, Kali Linux (Backtrack), Centos and RHEL 6.4 for a home lab.