Are these worth using for ESXi hosts? (poeredge 1750's)

I'm debating on whether to pick up a pair of Dell Poweredge 1750 servers (4GB RAM, dual 3.0GHz netburt Xeon's)

They don't support VT, (hyper threading p4 style Xeons), and are only 32-bit, so no 64-bit guest OS's

That being said, they're only $170CDN (about $150USD) each

Not sure if I should pick them up, since they are cheap., and throw ESXi on them for at home, or don't bother wasting my money and try to pick up some cheap 1950 III's when the Poweredge servers get refreshed with Nehalem Xeons? I won't be using the SCSI disks (they're sold without) so I don't have to worry about the noisy old storage, all VM's will be stored on an openfiler NAS.

Anyone think a 1750 is good for anything other than a space heater?

They'll be fine for that price. You'll more than likely run out of RAM before you start running into CPU or IO issues unless you're running Prime95 on the VMs or something (which you wouldn't do anyway).

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1404769 is a topic about another guy using 1750s, so don't worry about compatibility.

Thanks for the reply. I noticed that thread as well, didn't want to hijack it though

I've run ESX on a few different platforms, but always prefer to do things "right", unfortunately, I don't have the same kind of cashflow as my employer, so I'm not going to go and buy Dell R900's and Sun x4600's for my @ home VMware solution, haha.

I just want to add what I wrote in the other thread. I tried to install ESXi on a stock 1750 with dual 5130's (iirc, 2.4Ghz Xeons), a single 15K SCSI, and 2GB RAM. ESXi would not install and purplescreen on me. However, lopoetve said that it should work.

This is just so you are aware that it may not work out of the box and there may be some fiddling involved to potentially solve the same issue I ran into.

If you hit an issue, post it here - I'll see what I can find

Thanks for the comments guys. Still haven't decided if these are worth it. I might end up holding out for my tax return, and buy something a little more up to date. wouldn't mind going with quad core xeons and something with a SAS backplane.

Another thing to remember about the 1750s is that the cooling fans sound like a harrier taking off 24x7.

Power consumption on those will be quite high... hope your electric is cheap.

Run ESXi on these plenty of times with no issues. As said before, I hope you have earmuffs and plenty of power