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Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering, ESXi-OSDATA & VMFS Datastore? 

12.16.2024 by William Lam // 10 Comments

With the ability to to share a single NVMe device for both NVMe Tiering and a local VMFS datastore ... I had an idea to push this further and see if I could also get an ESXi-OSData partition running on the same shared NVMe device! 🤔

Simliar to the previous blog post, the underlying use case is really for dev/test environment where you may not have a ton of NVMe devices to dedicate to the various ESXi functions, especially true for those using small form factor (SFF) systems like an ASUS NUC or simliar. Most of the mainstream SFF systems usually comes with two, maybe three NVMe slots if you are lucky.

This technique would allow you to boot ESXi off of USB and then have key functions like ESXi-OSData and NVMe Tiering on a single shared NVMe while freeing up the other NVMe devices for use with vSAN, which you should have dedicated devices for whether you are considering vSAN OSA or ESA.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // ESX-OSData

Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering? 

12.09.2024 by William Lam // 9 Comments

I am a huge fan of the new NVMe Tiering capability within vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and it has been fantastic to hear more users taking advantage of this new feature to see what it can do for their homelab/development setup but also for their various production workloads.

As of right now, enabling NVMe Tiering requires a dedicated NVMe device, which for a production system is probably acceptable as you will probably want to ensure there are no other workloads competing for IO on the NVMe device. However, for a development environment or homelab, this can be challenge due to number of available NVMe devices that can be used.

Thank you to fellow reader Andrea T, for sharing this awesome tidbit with the community and how you CAN actually share a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering! 😍

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // ESXi 8.0 Update 3, NVMe

Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2024

10.30.2024 by William Lam // 20 Comments

Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year!

During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of my annual interesting VMware homelab kit blog post, simliar to HERE and HERE for 2023 and 2023 respectively. While I had planned for this originally, I was pretty busy this year and getting hands on with some of the latest Intel 14th Generation systems did not happen until much later and hence why I had not put anything together.

I was recently reminded of this request again and it feels like the right time to summarize the various kits that I have come across and/or have gotten hands on throughout the year.

Homelab Trends

There are also some interesting trends that I have observed in 2024, especially as it pertains to VMware Homelabs/Development/Testing purposes:

  • The support for non-binary DDR5 SODIMM memory modules has become the new norm and can enable small form factor systems to get up to 96GB of memory
  • Intel 14th (Consumer) CPU introduces a third core type (LPE) into its Hybrid architecture which has some implications as mentioned in my review of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro as an example
  • Having more M.2 NVMe or general NVMe slots will be extremely advantageous with the introduction of vSphere NVMe Memory Tiering capability
  • OCuLink supported peripherals, especially for external GPU and storage is slowly becoming a reality after its initial introduction in 2012 and may finally give Thunderbolt some competition

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // homelab

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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