Perhaps I should explain the term "ESX Whitebox" a little bit more since I have been digging into this matter so much that I even got the slang down. An ESX whitebox is a piece of hardware (or rather a combination of different hardware pieces) that will run ESX. Sounds pretty self-explanatory right? Well, the key thing here is that it is not that hard to find hardware that runs ESX without any issues. In fact, VMware even has a list up that details exactly which hardware is supported by ESX so it's not so hard to find supported hardware. The problem is that this is mostly server hardware which equals expensive, big, heavy and noisy. Not something I was looking for.

I was looking for a cheap, small and, if at all possible, an aesthetically pleasing whitebox. The cheap part is pretty self-explanatory. The requirement in terms of size is due to the fact that I travel a lot for my work with Quest and I often need to take this demo environment with me. Since a lot of this traveling is done by plane, I needed to find a ESX Whitebox that would fit in my carry on luggage. If you have ever seen the way your luggage us handled at airports you will understand why I need to have the ESX Whitebox with the in my carry on luggage. 

After a lot of searching, I found the perfect whitebox that fits all my needs and I wanted to share this config with you because it took me a lot of time to find the right configuration.  I have this setup running with VMware ESX 3.5 and it will also work with ESXi. I settled for this setup:

UPDATED March 2009: Apparantly the P3-P5G33 isend of life. The successor is even cheaper. It has different dimensions though. It is the Asus Terminator 3-P5G43.

This is all that you need and the best part is that this setup with warranty be delivered to your doorstep for under € 800 /$1000. This online webshop (Dutch) did that for me.
Of course, if you are a smart shopper and find the components at their cheapest price yourself it would easily be €100 cheaper. 

You can tweak this config. You could for example:

• Use a Dual Core system (not recommended)
• Use 4 GB of RAM ( would suffice for the environment I mentioned)
• Use bigger disks or buy more (recommended because 74 GB wears out pretty quickly)
• Add a SATA RAID adapter (not necessary for my demo setup)

Whatever you do, do not try to save money by choosing a cheaper / other harddisk. The VelociRaptor disks deliver excellent (SAS) performance for a fraction of the price of a SAS disk (not to mention controller).

Again this is just for demo purposes, so I would not stick this in your customer datacenter but it is a pretty potent system. The bottleneck so fat has been the disk but if you buy more / bigger VelociRaptor disks and perhaps even stripe them you will get some very good scalability.

I hope this helps you if you should even need to find a proper ESX whitebox. I would to hear what you guys are using.