January 21st, 2009 
Kiwi Si 
Well, it’s almost been a year since I published my first article around building a VMware ESX whitebox solution. This article was based around the HP Proliant ML110 G4, which still continues to whirr away quite happily in my ESX test lab running instances of W2K3, W2K8 and MS Exchange 2007.
Since this initial posting I have written articles about installing VMware ESX and ESXi on HP Proliant ML110 G5’s and the ML115 G5 Quad Core.
I have found these low-cost entry level HP servers, as I know have many others, ideally suited for a work or home based VMware ESX/ESXi lab for the purposes of pre-production testing, a basic development environment or for studying for your VMware VCP accreditation.
The comments and interest towards these articles has been overwhelming and I have (and continue to) enjoyed talking to and assisting others in getting their ESX/ESXi installation up and running on these great cost effective servers.
As I have now written a few articles around implementing these HP Proliant servers as a ESX white box solution I thought I’d bring all of the postings together via the summary and associated links below:
Installing VMware ESX on an HP Proliant ML110 (Intel) G4
Installing VMware ESX on an HP Proliant ML110 (Intel) G5
Installing VMware ESX/ESXi on an HP Proliant ML115 (AMD) G5 Quad Core
Also here are some links to my other relevant postings around these servers:
Installing VMware ESX on an HP Proliant ML110 G4 – Potential Issues.
Call for Information! Compiling details on VMware ESX compatibility with HP Proliant ML110 and Ml115’s models.
HP Proliant ML115 G5 Quad Core – Startup, Boot and Running Noise Levels Video.
Thanks to everyone that has read or contributed to the valuable conversations around the ML110/115’s on this site – much appreciated.
I still have a number of exciting (at least I think they are 
) new article topics around these servers in mind and am hoping to get a few online in the not so distant future.
Related posts:
- HP Proliant ML110 G5 – VT or not VT? That is the question… (When wanting to run a Hypervisor). About six months ago HP downgraded the hard disk size...
Posted in 
My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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It was your original article on ESX 3.5 running on the ML series that convinced me that I needed to seriously look at VMware career wise.
Now, I have 3 of ML115′s, packed with 8GB of RAM each and with additional HP SATA controllers (to overcome the notorious I/O performance/crashes on the inbuilt Nvidia controllers).
Keep up the excellent work!
Roger
N.B – Are you willing to accept articles from other contributors? I’m thinking of putting together some notes on my VCP study resources.
[Reply]
Hi Rog,
Good to hear from you – Happy New Year!
Thanks for the feedback on the articles – much appreciated. So glad you found the original article of use – definiately a good career move in my opinion.
Am certainly open to articles from others – drop me an email (address is at the top of the page).
Talk soon,
Si
[Reply]
I have started a virtualization wiki at http://www.vi-pedia.com. I’m trying to build a non-HCL list (Hardware that works with ESX but that isn’t on the official HCL) for ESX.
If you came across hardware that works, will you be so kind to fill it out on the wiwi at http://www.vi-pedia.com/Non-HCL_ESX35 ?
Thanks
Rynardt
[Reply]
[...] If you want the Full Monty and have supported hardware, you can install ESX. This product is optimized for performance, but is limited in the hardware you can use. Be sure that your system is listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide, although there are some good blogs around about running ESX on budget hardware and whiteboxes: http://ultimatewhitebox.com/ http://www.vm-help.com/Whitebox_HCL.php http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esx-whitebox-solutions-an-article-summary [...]
[...] More of my related HP Proliant ML110/115 and VMware ESX articles can be found on this summary page here. [...]
[...] and myself (Simon Seagrave) will be presenting a session on putting together and running your own VMware vSphere home or work lab. This will cover most aspects of the implementation including real world advice, gotchas and [...]
[...] VMware ESX WhiteBox Solutions – An Article Summary. (TechHead) [...]