On a regular basis I already receive a number of inquires from both internal VMware folks as well as external partners and customers about VMware homelabs and the type of hardware that can be used. After demo’ing our recent USB to SDDC project, the requests have literally tripled! Most folks are generally inquiring BOM details and/or where to […]
Update on Intel NUC 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) & ESXi 6.x
Intel just started shipping their i3 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Intel NUCs and no surprise, Florian of virten.net has already gotten his hands on a unit for testing. The Intel NUCs is a very popular platform for running vSphere/vSAN-based home labs, especially for their price point and footprint. Last week, Florian discovered from his testing that the built-in network adapter on the 7th Gen NUC […]
ESXi on the new Intel NUC Skull Canyon
Earlier this week I found out the new Intel NUC “Skull Canyon” (NUC6i7KYK) has been released and have been shipping for a couple of weeks now. Although this platform is mainly targeted at gaming enthusiast, there have also been a lot of anticipation from the VMware community on leveraging the NUC for a vSphere based home lab. Similiar to the 6th Gen […]
Adding custom VSAN BIOS splash screen to the Intel NUC
One of the last things I wanted to look into after setting up my new VSAN 6.2 home lab on the new 6th Gen Intel NUC was to add a custom BIOS splash screen giving my system a personal touch. Updating the BIOS splash screen would require flashing the BIOS itself which gave me some concerns after hearing about the BIOS v33 issue […]
VSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0 Update 2) homelab on 6th Gen Intel NUC
As many of you know, I have been happily using an Apple Mac Mini for my personal vSphere home lab for the past few years now. I absolutely love the simplicity and the versatility of the platform to easily run a basic vSphere lab to being able to consume advanced capabilities of the vSphere platform like VMware VSAN or NSX for example. The Mac Mini’s also supports […]