• VMWare ESX HCL (Hardware Compatibility List)
  • VMware Compatibility Guide [html]
  • Systems Compatibility Guide [pdf]
  • VMware ESX SATA and PATA Compatibility Cheat Sheet
• workstation motherboards aren't designed to handle enough I/O for more than ~2 VMs
• SATA drives are NOT supported by VMWare ESX
  "There are instances of customers using supported SAS controllers with SATA drives connected, in many instances this will work, but ESX does NOT officially support these configurations in version 3.0. They have not been validated as part of the ESX Q/A cycle. ESX 3.0 does not support the use of local SATA,IDE or EIDE for VMFS.
• building an ESXi server for <$2000

performance bottlenecks (ie. spending too much money on one piece of hardware, and too little on another)

• comparison of different VM systems
• @lonesysadmin.net
• @vmware.com
• @searchvmware.techtarget.com
• @vkernel.com
• @petri.co.il
• @ittoday.info