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A Small 8 Bay Home Nas / ESXI Server is something I had been wanting to build for a while. Unfortunately small and 8x 3.5″ drive bays are not something that can be often found together in the same sentence when looking to build your own home NAS / ESXI Server Build. However i then found the U-NAS NSC-800 which was perfect for the job of housing my 8 Bay Home Nas The U-NAS NSC-800 featured: 8 x 3.5” SATA/SAS Hot-Swap Drive Bays 1x 2.5″ HDD/SSD Internal Drive Bays 1x PCI / PCI Express Expansion Slots 316mm x 254mm x 180mm dimensions Mini ITX motherboard compatibility The SAS breakout cables were already fitted in the case, so all I required was an actual SAS  SATA / Raid controller. The most important thing here was the 8x SATA drive bays which i could fill with large 3.5″ drives with space for an internal 2.5″ hard drive / SSD for installing the OS on, or the data store for virtual machines when running Vmware ESXI in my case. The PCI Express expansion slot would be perfect for a SATA / Raid controller which would be essential to connect up the 8x drives, finally i could fit a Mini-ITX motherboard with…

A VMware ESXI Low Power server for learning at home is something I have been interested in for a quite a while. Both VMware Esxi and Microsoft’s Hyper V Server is something i’ve kept randomly hearing about over the years, I recently did some reading up and decided a little VMware ESXI Low Power server dedicated to running virtual machines on my home network would be perfect. I’m always experimenting and trying new things in my free time. Usually when its been something totally new, for example a beta of Windows i’ve simply installed it on another hard drive and dual booted it. I personally don’t think that’s the most piratical thing in the world to do, I find that I end up booting back in to my main operating system, then staying in it. So this is where VMware Esxi or Microsoft’s Hyper V Server would be perfect, the idea is a little low powered pc can sit in a cupboard and run virtual machines, then be remotely accessed from any PC on my network. So with the idea in my head this is a project i wanted to do, i set about looking firstly at low power usage computers. Most of the thing i looked at were not really suitable, either been vastly underpowered in the case of Nettop…