I thought I would put a quick post up for anyone who has been considering going with an Atom setup.

So in the past I have had a mixture of VMs running from my WHS box and ESXi box. One box was an old Athlon, and the other 64bit Athlon. Both boxes consumed over 160watts and I one of these was supposed to be my PC Gaming rig, anyway the main driver was to save some cash on my already big techno powered electricity bill.

So I know my single core Atom Aspire One uses not alot of power, and isnt a bad performer. So I start looking at the different mobos available that will fit in an ATX case, and they are all limited to 2Gb RAM, and not many dual cores.

Last month I came across the Point of View NVIDIA ION Mini ITX, which apprarently if you can afford it supports 8GB DDR2 800Mhz SO-DIMM memory. So anyway I went for this with 4GB DDR2 800mhz memory with the 1.6Ghz Dual Core Atom.

I have to say I am chuffed. I couldnt setup a ESXi server on it as the onboard HD controller isnt supported, and I dont have a PCI-E controller to test so I stuck with WHS (2003 Server) as the base and ran VMware Server ontop. I have 8VMs on the go and all seems to handle perfectly. I am really impressed, and best of all at full tilt with 4 HDs its only eating a max of 60watts.

Certainly worth considering if you want something reasonably priced, low on power consumption, and reasonable capabilities.

See my blog post for a couple of pics

ESXi is notorioulsy picky about HD controllers and NIC's. I had good luck using a mATX motherboard and purchasing a separate sata controller card. The best resource I have found for compatible hardware information is the ESX white box list at vm-help.com.