Vmware Sphere with Fault tolerent

I think the ram you will need alone is going to cost nearly that much. For around $700 I see nicely configured 2970's on the used market. These are super sweet hosts for this application. When shopping around your cores and your ram will be key factors on how good of a deal it is. Try to get at least a basic Perc/i controller in there for the ESX load. Also try for a redundant power supply too.

If your talking HA and FT? Your going to need at least two of these right?

For 2070, what processor is that? Opteron I think. Then I have think of Processor that support FT.

I agree with Johnadco, basicly the ram needs to be a 2GB to 3GB for vCenter. This will allow you to vmotion and have a HA/LB/FT enviroment. Also you need to consider the switch and data paths. You will need iSCSI or FCoE Storage. This will allow for true failover with datastores. You could do it localy with local storage, but datastores will chew up resources localy and everyone one disk will kill IOPS. Thus nothing, but problems down the road.

Its not that Dell Equipment is high, we have a awesome market value. Have you researched Redhat's KVM or Citrix or another open source alternative.
http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb&brandid=2803&fid=922

Hello

This is for my home lab for VCP study. That is all.

Yes, atlest two esx host for I can practice clusters in HA, DRS and FT.

Hi Patrick2011,

The Dell PE2970 is an AMD Opteron based server.

With your budget constraints, one possibility is to do nested ESX on a single server. For instance, ESX host server has a VM that is running ESX with its own VMs. Please refer to this very nice write-up http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/ by Eric Gray. Please note that this is not endorsed or supported by VMware; but it would be perfect in a test/practice environment.

Regards,

Kong