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ESXi on palm size iKOOLCORE R1

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Towards the end of 2022, I came to learn about a really fascinating mini PC called the R1, that is manufactured by a company called iKOOLCORE, which is based out of China. iKOOLCORE is described as specializing in open source firewall applications and the R1 adds some interesting networking possibilities as you will see shortly.


What really makes the R1 standout is that it comes equipped with four built-in ethernet adapters that is packaged into a super compact form factor with a pretty elegant design. In fact, the R1 might actually be the worlds smallest x86 system that literally fits in the palm of your hand! 😎

With the compact design and flexibility in networking, the R1 can certainly enable a number of interesting use cases for VMware Homelabs like running infrastructure systems (vCenter Server Appliance, VMware Cloud Builder, Active Directory, etc.) to networking services (DNS, DHCP, Firewall, VPN, etc). The R1 can also make for a great portable homelab that you can bring anywhere and not have to worry about space or noise and is powered simply through USB-PD (Power Delivery) which makes it even more friendly to travel with.

The only thing left was to get my hands on the R1 and thanks to the creator and designer of the R1, who goes by the name of Jackeroo, I was able to give the R1 a spin and explore it from a VMware Homelab perspective.

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VMware Cloud Foundation with a single ESXi host for Management Domain?

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By default, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts to construct the Management Domain which is fine for a production environment, but it can be a challenge for those interested in explore VCF in a homelab setting.

I recently came to learn about a really cool tidbit from one of our VCF Engineers on how you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single ESXi host, ideal for a homelab setup! 😍


Not only could this benefit users in deploying a physical VCF setup but it would also benefit anyone using my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VCF, which makes it super easy by leveraging my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance VMs.


In fact, that was how I quickly verified this trick works using my VCF automation script 😀

The way that this work is a configuration change to Cloud Builder to tell it to allow a single ESXi host to be used and it will simply setup a single node vSAN Cluster, which is typically how you would bootstrap if you were doing a greenfield deployment. The only difference here is that instead of adding additional 3 x ESXi hosts to provide redundancy for Management Domain, it simply is relaxing that requirement and thus allowing for a single ESXi host. vSAN is still a requirement for VCF Management Domain, so ensure you can meet those requirements still.

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Quick Tip - Additional NVMe vendors (SK Hynix & Sabrent) for ESXi homelab

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The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe is a pretty popular SSD model that is used by many within the VMware Homelab Community. However, in recent months, there have been an alarming amount of reports from owners that their 980 Pro NVMe devices have been failing prematurely due to firmware issues.

Samsung has finally acknowledge the problem with a firmware fix and it looks like a simliar fix is also planned for the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe.

While I can not comment on the specific issues with the Samsung 980/990 Pro NVMe devices, I have had my own failures with cheaper Samsung M.2 NVMe devices where I lost my vSAN setup since I only had a single vSAN diskgroup comprised of single cache and capacity SSD for my homelab. While not ideal, this is to be expected since I had no redundancy and consumer hardware can and will fail over time. I ended upgrading both of my SSDs to a Samsung 970 Plus, which luckily is not affected by the firmware issues.

I typically recommend Samsung, Intel and Western Digital NVMe devices as they typically just work with ESXi, especially for homelab purposes where cost is one of the factors. From some of the online posts that I have read about the current Samsung 980/990 Pro issues, it seems that many have lost faith in Samsung and some have even stated that they will no longer consider Samsung for storage purchases.

This was also a simliar sentiment when I recently spoke with a fellow VMware colleague who was also impacted by the firmware issues. As part of our discussion, he had shared a couple of alternative vendors that he has is now using and recommending for his VMware Homelab setup which also includes vSAN. I thought this was good information that could also benefit folks in the community looking for other storage options.

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