homelab

E100-9W – A new fanless Supermicro “NUC” platform

01/19/2021 by William Lam 12 Comments

At the end of 2020, I had published a blog article which covers the latest Supermicro kits that are being used and others that can be used for both VMware Homelabs as well as for production workloads. The article was very well received, especially as this is a topic that I frequently get questions about on the latest hardware kits that will work with vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

While researching for the article, I had a chance to speak with the Supermicro Product Manager and I came to learn about a new E100-9W platform that was just released last Spring of 2020. This platform is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family of servers and focuses on use cases such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage to name a few. Many of these use cases are also applicable to our VMware customer base, especially for running a small and lower power footprint at an Edge or ROBO location. I was also interested in this platform as it could also be interesting for VMware homelabs.

ESXi on 11th Gen Intel NUC (Panther Canyon) & (Tiger Canyon)

01/13/2021 by William Lam 51 Comments

The highly anticipated 11th Generation Intel NUCs based on the new Tiger Lake processors has just been announced by Intel and I am excited to share my first hand experience with this new NUC platform. There are currently two models in the new 11th Gen lineup: the Intel NUC 11 Performance codenamed Panther Canyon (pictured on the left) which is the successor to the 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC and the Intel NUC 11 Pro codenamed Tiger Canyon (pictured on the right) which is the successor to the 8th Gen (Provo Canyon) NUC.

There are a number of new improvements and capabilities that will make these new NUCs quite popular for anyone looking to build or upgrade their vSphere environment in 2021.

Before diving right in, I must say I love the new aesthetic look of the NUC chassis. In previous versions, the lid had a glossy and shiny finish, which easily left hand prints. These new models now have a clean matte finish. The NUC 11 Performance has a smoother feel compared to the NUC 11 Pro which has more of a texture to the finish, which I personally prefer. The other noticeable change is the power adapter, which is now half the size now which is nice for those looking to have several of these new kits sitting next to each other.

UPDATE (02/17/21) - The Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling has been released and is required for ESXi to recognize the new onboard 2.5GbE network adapter on all Intel NUC 11 models

Other Intel and AMD small form factor (SFF) systems for vSphere Homelabs

08/06/2020 by William Lam 40 Comments

When it comes to selecting a platform for a vSphere Homelab, there are many options which include building your own "whitebox" system. For the large majority of folks, the preference is to purchase a ready to use kit such as an Intel NUC or Supermicro which both extremely popular. These systems not only work well but their form factor is also ideal for home offices where space is always at a premium.

With that said, there are many other small form factor (SFF) platforms that exists out in the market and not just Intel-based systems, but also AMD SFF kits which are being introduced and have been getting many inquiries about. As someone who keeps a close eye on this market for new and interesting platforms, I have been re(sharing) some of these new updates on Twitter.

Although Twitter is great way to share and discuss news, it is not the best place to consolidate this type of information that can easily be searched. This was one the motivation for putting together this post for both informational awareness but also something that can be updated over time. This was certainly a challenge when asked about other SFF options, especially in the AMD space where I was not able to easily point folks to. Below is a collection of SFF for both Intel and AMD that I have come across, some of which are currently being used for vSphere Homelabs and others having the potential given their specification. In addition, I suspect many of the kits below which report 32GB of memory as their max should be able to go up 64GB as I have shown in the past with NUC platform.

If folks have other SFF kits they would like to share or confirm that works with latest versions of vSphere, feel free to leave a comment which can help others in the VMware Community.

Special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy

04/10/2020 by William Lam 12 Comments

The VMware Community Homelabs Project is a crowdsourcing effort that I had started back in February that enables the VMware community to help share the various VMware homelab configurations, usage and costs into a single location that can benefit our larger community. With the success of that project and the "hardware" aspects out of the way, I wanted to see what else I could do to help our VMware community in terms of the "software" aspects, as that is just as important.

The most popular solution by far today is to sign up for a VMUG Advantage membership which gives you access to a number of benefits including training and VMworld discounts but also to EVALExperience, which provides you with 365-days access (non-production usage) to the latest VMware solutions such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the $200 USD membership and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab purposes. Throughout the year, there are usually promo codes that you can find that ranges anywhere from 5-10% discount, but I wanted to see if we could do better 🙂

Today, I am very excited to announce a partnership between virtuallyGhetto and the VMware User Group (VMUG) organization to share with the VMware Community a special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy offering. The table below provides the respective discounts based on the quantity of VMUG Advantage membership purchases. The larger the interests group, the larger the discount.

UPDATE (04/25/20) - The survey has officially closed and I will send in the final list to the VMUG folks which you will be receiving an email with instructions on how to obtain your promotional code. In total, we had a total of 701 respondents!

UPDATE (04/20/20) - We now have over 600+ folks registered. Everyone signed up (please sign up as that is the only way to take part in the group buy) will receive the 15% discount. I have already spoken to the VMUG folks and they will be working on getting the promotion code ready so folks can start purchasing immediately, stay tuned for that update via email. We have also agreed to leave the survey up for another week (Fri 4/24 will be last day) to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to sign up.

Quantity	Discount	Cost
~~1-99~~	12%	$176
~~100-199~~	14%	$172
200-300	15%	$170

With the GA of vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0, there is no better time to consider VMUG Advantage to get access to the latest releases. If that was not enough, I should also mention that VMUG Advantage will also include the upcoming VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 release, which will allow folks to also try out the new vSphere with Kubernetes capabilities, which is currently only available as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation SKU.

Note: Licenses from VMUG Advantage can NOT be used for Production purposes.

If you are interested in participating in the VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy, please fill out the following survey below to express your interests in purchasing a VMUG Advantage subscription(s). This survey is planned to be open for two weeks to gauge the level of interests and help determine the final promotion discount. Please share this with friends and colleagues and its never too early to start thinking about Christmas gifts for that special someone 😉

Once the survey period has closed, you will be contacted by the VMUG organization with the details of the promotion along with the promotion code to apply towards your VMUG Advantage membership. Depending on the amount of interests, we could potentially close the survey sooner if we reach 200+ folks.

Here's short URL for the survey in case you want to share with others: http://vmwa.re/vmug-adv-groupbuy

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Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

03/30/2020 by William Lam 98 Comments

With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

VMware Community Homelabs Project

02/11/2020 by William Lam 2 Comments

On a weekly basis, I easily get at least half a dozen inquires ranging from our customers, partners and even internal VMware employees on the topic of VMware Homelabs. The most common requests I receive is whether hardware X will work and whether I have tried it to recommended known build-of-materials (BOM). Funny enough, just last week I was asked to review our CTO's (Greg Lavender) BOM as he was also interested in building his own personal VMware homelab which goes to show just how popular this topic really is 😊

Although I have written a TON of content regarding VMware Homelabs, I definitely can not cover every single permutation. Having seen so many awesome VMware Homelabs over the years from the VMware Community, why not leverage the power of our community to crowdsource all the different homelab configurations into a single location which can then be shared with the rest of the community? This idea was kicked off about two weeks ago and I have put together a simple Google Form which you can find the link below to submit your information.

Submit VMware Community Homelab: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/homelab

As of writing this blog post today, I have received a total of 48 valid submissions (there were a handful that had invalid URLs and/or did not follow directions and published a publicly accessible URL to their homelab BOM which I had to remove from the submission). The submissions have been pretty interesting to see and just how different each homelab is, especially from a cost perspective ranging from $800 up to $150,000 🤯At that price, this is a full blown datacenter and I am sure folks have an ideas on who owns those labs (hint, its not me 😉). I want to thank everyone who has submitted to the project and help get the word out, hopefully we will see even more submissions in 2020! The results have been pretty interesting and it is great to see how different each homelab is, especially on the price

For now, you can view the complete results in the short URL below and periodically I will process any additional submissions and publish them to the Github repo.

VMware Community Homelab Results: http://vmwa.re/homelab