I'm putting together an estimate of the hardware costs for a vSphere ESX4 project. Imagine a google-like rack with just motherboards and power supplies in trays probably booting off USB sticks or PXE into ESX4 all connected to a NAS for shared storage with dual 1000meg nic's and jumbo packets.
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Q1) What is the least expensive brand name motherboard and Intel processor
that would give us all the HA and FT features vSphere offers? So far I'm looking at an ASUS P5BV-C motherboard and an Intel Xeon E3110 Wolfdale 3.0GHz processor with 4GB of ram could run under $400 per node, but I'd prefer to find a dual processor motherboard. Any better suggestions? I'm looking at this chart for help picking the processor: http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=456.
Q2) If I'm not mistaken EVC only works with Merom, Penryn, and new Nehalem Xeon processors. Even without EVC I should be able to take full advantage of moving VM's between nodes without downtime right? And as long as the processor is compatible with FT and HA is enabled and working I should be able to do live VM migrations correct? I believe EVC simply enables one to migration VM's between hosts with different CPU models, right?
So if two hosts have different Xeon processors like an Intel Xeon i7 Nehalem and an Intel Xeon Core 2 Merom I be able to run a VM in FT mode across both of those hosts BUT only with EVC, correct?