Homelab

1034 readers

3 users here now

Rules

Be Civil.
Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
No memes or potato images.
We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
Please no shitposting or blogspam.
No Referral Linking.
Keep piracy discussion off of this community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

communick@selfhosted.forum

rglullis@communick.news

free esxi limitations? (alien.top)

submitted 2 years ago by baconwrappedapple@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm thinking about using free ESXi for a home lab environment, but curious what the limitations are. I've found most of them via google, and since I don't plan to do backups it's fine.

What's ambiguous to me is if powercli is supported.

I don't need to learn about virtualization as a platform at home so I just need something that works. I was previously responsible for a vSphere environment with over 2500 VMs on over 50 ESX hosts so I know vSphere well.

I need a place to host a bunch of linux VMs.

I've never touched proxmox but don't really have interest in that unless someone can make a case for it. I almost think I'd be better off throwing windows 10 on the machine and using hypver-v if free esxi is going to be too useless

thoughts?

top 2 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] trekxtrider@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

My only beef with running free ESXI in a homelab is you need a raid controller if you want to use more than one drive. Proxmox and even TrueNas Scale both support ZFS and you can still use a raid controller in IT mode if you like.

Just running TrueNas on old consumer hardware I have retired from gaming. I only run mirrored pairs, SSDs for VMs/container and HDDs for bulk storage.

[–] ThatsNASt@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

8 vcpu per VM limitation, no backups via API, no vCenter management, moving VM's between locations is a damn pain. You should get an NFR license from work if you're a Vmware partner or have a VCP. Vmug advantage membership is also an option for $200 year and you get access to basically everything Vmware has to offer.