by William Lam // 10 Comments
There are many options when it comes to moving or copying Virtual Machine(s) across two ESXi hosts that are fully licensed and can be managed by a vCenter Server, but what about standalone ESXi hosts that only use the Free ESXi Hypervisor license?
Luckily, we have a couple of native solutions from VMware that not only work, but they are completely free to use, which some folks may not even realize!
by William Lam // 23 Comments
I have to say, the @IntelGraphics team does a very nice job on their packaging!
Look forward to kicking the tires on their new Arc GPUs, luckily this fits nicely in the Intel 12 Extreme NUC (Dragon Canyon) ? pic.twitter.com/DHTC93pzmc
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) January 21, 2023
I recently had the opportunity to play with one of Intel's Arc 7 series discrete GPU (A750), which is part of the new Intel Arc desktop graphics product line, that was just released last Fall. While the primary audience for the Intel Arc graphics is for creators and desktop gaming, I was really interested in its applicability for a vSphere-based environment which also has a number of interesting use cases for graphics from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding/rendering, AI/ML, Kubernetes, general purpose graphics acceleration and even basic gaming to name a few.
While there are many GPU options in the market for vSphere, depending on your needs and budget, the new Intel's new Arc 7 series could be a nice modern option as it is touted to be both price and performance competitive with other offerings within the market.
by William Lam // 2 Comments
I was recently chatting with a fellow colleague who asked an interesting question about the memory overhead between running vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) versus the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) from a VMware Homelab perspective. I honestly did not know the answer as I am only using vSAN OSA for my personal homelab. I was curious myself, especially its implicationn on small form factor (SFF) systems which typically max at out 64GB of memory.
Today, vSAN ESA is only officially supported when using vSAN ESA Ready Nodes which are all listed in the vSAN ESA HCL and the minimum amount of memory is 512GB. For the best possible experience and supported configurations, customers should only use approved vSAN ESA hardware and the use of any other systems will not yield the same benefits nor outcomes. As an aside, a fantastic resource for all things vSAN ESA can be found on the vSAN ESA TechZone page, which I highly recommend bookmarking as there is a lot of in-depth technical resources and collateral.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and is purely for educational purposes, use at your own risk.