About a month ago I had a friend contact me asking about some issues he had while buidling a low cost ESX server for his home lab.  He was having difficulty with regards to one small piece of hardware, and he didn’t know about the hardware compatibility list for ESX.  While it’s a bit late for my friend Dave, here is some great instructions on how to build a $500 ESX Server.  Also check out the VM Help site for an unofficial whitebox HCL list; this is not hardware offially supported by VMware but apparently tested by the internet VMware community…your milage may vary.