#10 it?s LOUD ? no I?m not one of these overly noise sensitive guys that want mod their PC?s for zero sound. I have 2x PC?s in my living room, both with stock fans, and I don?t notice the noise of them, I have a Cisco switch with a fan that is dyeing that really doesn?t bother me, I have heard 15k rpm SCSI drives with bad bearings, This thing is worse. It blasts the Fans at full speed 24/7.  Even with the latest firmware patches and HP drivers installed there seems to be no way in making the thing slow down the fans. Remember and think about this before you buy one for your home, better to have a basement or a room far away from the rest of your daily life for it.

#9 it?s a great server so far, they are selling for a decent price on eBay, I got a dual 3.2ghz processor, dual power supply, 3GB of ram, two drive sleds for $122 shipped. No hard disks included but I have more than a couple SCSI disks collecting dust around the house.

#8 Yes its only 32bit, but for my uses this hasn?t seemed to be an issue, I?m not going to run Solaris/OpenSolaris on it. ZFS loves ram and 64bit address space so its Windows Server and Linux mostly.

#7 have a monitor around, yes it has an iLo (integrated lights out management) but unless you get one with the advanced license activated, you will be limited to boot up messages and static text screens, even a typical Linux/VMware  text installer will not show up in the ILO because it detects the fast updating text as graphics.

#6 HP Insight manager is a pig for home usage, it wants 2.5GB of ram to install smoothly, you can leave it at that and tell ESXi to limit it to a much lower amount once you get it installed, but it?s still a pig.

#5 Cheap SCSI Disks are small.  18.2GB used to seem like a lot, but when you start giving 8GB per guest it adds up quickly.

#4 ESXi and OpenSolaris ZFS rock together,  I?m storing my guests on my OpenSolaris server with 4x 500 GB sata drives in a raidz pool, not a speed demon but fast enough to keep ESXi happy once I added a small 1.5 GB zVol from another pool ( a single 1.5 TB sata drive) as a slog device really helps. I made it so small so that ZFS's ARC could cache it as much a possible and if the pool isn't busy doing anything else the harddisk head would only have to make small track to track moves giving it the best performance possible so far I have only seen it use less than 300MB max so even the 1.5GB may be too big in this workload.  Its nice to see 100MB/s writes to my zpool, and get a gigabit switch if you are going to do this.

#3 the server does a lot, I have had 4 windows 2k3 guests running, and a small linux guest with no performance issues, I?m a SPARC guy I can be pretty patient.

#2 disk and ram are the most important things for ESXi, haven?t really pegged the CPU much during my use so far.  Will be adding 2GB of ram bringing the total to 5GB, when the job market picks up I will be replacing the 1GB dim set with 4GB dim set taking the system to 8GB which should be more than enough for my needs.

#1 it?s LOUD ? this can?t be over stated, if you live with anyone else that is not tolerant of your toys and the noise they make its probably best to look elsewhere for a ESXi solution.