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Homelab considerations for vSphere 8

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There has been a lot of great technical content from both VMware and the broader community since the announcement of vSphere 8, which happened a few weeks ago. I know many of you are excited to get your hands on both vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and while we wait for GA, I wanted to share some of my own personal experiences but also some of the considerations for those interested in running vSphere 8 in their homelab.

As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify that all of your hardware and the underlying components are officially listed on the VMware HCL, which will be updated when vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 GA's. This is the only way to ensure that you will have the best possible experience and a supported configuration from VMware.

Disclaimer: The following considerations are based on early observations using pre-GA builds of vSphere 8 and it does not reflect any official guidance or support from VMware.

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vSphere 8 productizes Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi

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Back in July with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3f, I had shared that all Intel i219 devices from the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi is now part of default ESXi 7.0 Update 3f installation. This simplified the ESXi installation process as customers no longer needed to create a custom ESXi ISO that contains the Fling driver.

While the e1000-community module within the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi has been productized, the Fling also includes another driver module called igc-community which adds support for Intel i220, i225 & i226 PCIe-based network devices. For recent Intel NUC platforms like the Intel NUC 11 (Panther Canyon & Tiger Canyon), Intel NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon), Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon) the Fling is still required for ESXi to recognize the onboard network interfaces.

As of vSphere 8, which was recently announced at VMware Explore US, I am happy 😆 (or jacked, jazzed, or pumped) to share that the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi will be fully productized! Customers who install ESXi 8.0 will no longer need to create a custom ESXi Image and the network devices listed on the Fling page will automatically be detected by ESXi.

How to manually clean up a Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) on an ESXi host?

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If an ESXi host was connected to a Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) and you were not able to properly remove it from the vCenter inventory, which cleans up the VDS as part of the removal, then you will be left with a stale VDS configuration.


Of course, the ideal workflow is to clean this up within vCenter Server but if you some how lost access or the vCenter Server was deleted and you might be wondering how to manually clean this up?

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