Looking to build an ESXi server tower. (May move to rackmount in the future, but due to space constraints right meow)
This will be used to make a virtual AD domain, and some clients composed of Win (various versions), Mac, and Ubuntu. All will be connected to a vSwitch
This will be a pentesting lab that I will be hooking up my physical kali box into the same physical switch that the ESXi server is connected to.
Trying to keep costs down as well as power consumption. If I can get by with lower clock speed with more cores and lower TDP, I want to go that route.
Realistically you might be able to get away with a ryzen 1700... Low power and 8c16th but then again, if you need ALL the cores possible perhaps not. Then again virtualization strangeness... But low power high perf. .... Well. It depends on use case really.
You might want to look at the dual socket x99 motherboards and the high core count ES Xeon, that could work if you need as many cores/threads as possible for relatively cheap
Not looking High perf. just enough cores to allocate to each vMachine. I was looking at most 2 cores for clients and 4 for AD Server. And however many ESXi wants for itself.
if you want insane amounts of cores ... but also it will cost a fair bit - LGA 2011 V3
and then 2 of these... or basically whatever you can find for a good deal really:
If you want to go the cheaper route than LGA 2011 probably
actually no its the same price for motherboards for LGA 2011 as 2011v3 even if the CPUs are much cheaper if i was doing it then i would pick the newer chipset... yeah.
You might be able to find a used dual socket server for cheap though
Let's start by dispelling the myth that each VM needs it's own dedicated core, they don't else virtualization would never have taken off the way it did. 1 core can easily be shared by 4 VM's that are doing Sweet FA.
If your VM's are just for labs, learning and testing you could get by on an i3 & 16GB just fine. It might not very pretty but believe me I've had students in the past running 6+ Windows Server 2012 R2 VM's on laptops with this configurations. Adding an SSD to the laptop was the key to usability.
Hypervisors like Hyper-V and ESXi are good at managing shared resources for VM's, they can also dynamically add or remove RAM to the VM's as needed.
If you want a decent workstation for hosting VM labs with 8 VM's the minimum I would go for would be;
i7 or FX83xx (6 or 8 core Ryzen would be ace) 24GB 512GB SSD or nvram disk (space for the VM's).
Also if for example you needed 4 Windows VM's you also wouldn't create 4 VM's, first you create just one, update it, then sysprep it and shutdown. You then use that image as the base for the rest of them so you save disk space as well.
I would go Ryzen or wait for Naples for this project.
Like @BGL said, if you're not loading all your VM's at the same time, you're going to be better off going 8 core Ryzen. You'll have plenty of CPU power and with 24/32GB of ram and an NVMe, you'll come out ahead of the curve. Whether ESXi officially supports Ryzen is another story. Honestly, I'd go with proxmox for this situation. It's comparable and more compatible.