Planning to Purchase - MacPro 2009

[MHUMAC]

Hi All,

I have always liked the Aluminium Mac Pro's ; lately I have seen some Mac Pro 2009 going under USD 900 with dual-quad xeon and 6GB RAM, 1 x 640GB HDD.

Why I want to purchase:

a) To upgrade this machine with a 64GB DDR3 1600MHz Kingston RAM (NON-ECC) (Not sure whether this will work - but I have read that NON-ECC worked for many ppl).

b) To Install 2 x 512GB Crucial SSD and 2 x 3TB SATA HDD (all 4 disk bays)
c) Use the spare optical bay / sata connection for a Boot-SSD 240GB Corsair.
d) Install ESX 6.x (I have the subscription vmug and i can get NFR from work too).
e) Virtualize OSX EL-Capitan (1 desktop vm) + 1 OSX Server VM + other windows, linux based VMs
f) To use this to enhance my skills on vsphere, OSX server.

I already have a mac-mini late 2014, 8GB RAM, 1TB SATA HDD, it's more of a home machine, used by my wife for her email / work and home-photos.

Your expert suggestions will be great in helping me decide.

Kind regards

 

[snarfquest]

Hi All,

I have always liked the Aluminium Mac Pro's ; lately I have seen some Mac Pro 2009 going under USD 900 with dual-quad xeon and 6GB RAM, 1 x 640GB HDD.

Why I want to purchase:

a) To upgrade this machine with a 64GB DDR3 1600MHz Kingston RAM (NON-ECC) (Not sure whether this will work - but I have read that NON-ECC worked for many ppl).

b) To Install 2 x 512GB Crucial SSD and 2 x 3TB SATA HDD (all 4 disk bays)
c) Use the spare optical bay / sata connection for a Boot-SSD 240GB Corsair.
d) Install ESX 6.x (I have the subscription vmug and i can get NFR from work too).
e) Virtualize OSX EL-Capitan (1 desktop vm) + 1 OSX Server VM + other windows, linux based VMs
f) To use this to enhance my skills on vsphere, OSX server.

I already have a mac-mini late 2014, 8GB RAM, 1TB SATA HDD, it's more of a home machine, used by my wife for her email / work and home-photos.

Your expert suggestions will be great in helping me decide.

Kind regards

I've a loaded up MacPro 2008 that I tried to run ESXi on. Didn't work out. Not sure if it is just that ESXi doesn't like to boot on a 2008 pro or what. Other issue is I went semi low cost on a SAS Raid controller that is totally not supported by ESXi. Left me only access to the 4 internal bays. I ended up running OSX / OSX Server, VMWareFusion and I run an ESXi VM under Fusion to play around with. I'd be very curious to know how well ESXi runs on a 2009 and newer MacPros..