The cheapest way is to pick up an old ThinkStation (or other tower), load it up with 128GB (or more) of ram and install ESXI on it. That's a perfectly good baseline, and you can run about 30 4gb linux VMs on it.
Ideally you'd have a bit less than 1 core per VM, just so it's a bit slow. Lots of people assume your nodes are quick, but in real life they may not be. And really, most of the time your machines won't be doing squat.
You might want to have SSDs in there too, because ESXI doesn't have RAID capability (or at least mine didn't). I don't think you can get a cloud device that uses spinning disks anymore, and you wouldn't use it in real life anyway.
A 2tb drive is cheap these days, or just slap all those old small SSDs in there. Everyone has a bunch of those small SSDs left over, and they're perfect.
ESXi needs the RAID to be handled by another device, the simplest case is a hardware RAID card with disks locally attached to it. You can also attach remote disks/volumes from other systems, with or without RAID, over the network/SAN/etc using an HBA, special network card, or the software iscsi initiator stuff in ESXi. You can even have something like a windows server act as the iscsi volume host, and attach to it over the normal network if you don't really care about reliability. The ESXi OS will not appreciate it if you ever turn the remote volume host system off, or if the network drops out. It's really too bad the free and cheap ESXi licenses are going away, it was always so nice to work with...
The cheapest way is to pick up an old ThinkStation (or other tower), load it up with 128GB (or more) of ram and install ESXI on it. That's a perfectly good baseline, and you can run about 30 4gb linux VMs on it.
Ideally you'd have a bit less than 1 core per VM, just so it's a bit slow. Lots of people assume your nodes are quick, but in real life they may not be. And really, most of the time your machines won't be doing squat.
You might want to have SSDs in there too, because ESXI doesn't have RAID capability (or at least mine didn't). I don't think you can get a cloud device that uses spinning disks anymore, and you wouldn't use it in real life anyway.
A 2tb drive is cheap these days, or just slap all those old small SSDs in there. Everyone has a bunch of those small SSDs left over, and they're perfect.