WilliamLam.com

Slick Jonsbo D31 computer case with embedded LCD screen for homelab

by // 1 Comment

Last month, I noticed a very interesting DIY (Do it Yourself) computer build from fellow colleague Cyprien Laplace, who you might know from the ESXi-Arm team.


No surprise, the build was for a new ESXi-Arm homelab using an ASRock Ampere Altra (ALTRAD8UD-1L2T) and configured with 64 CPUs and 128GB of memory! 🔥

At first, when Cyprien was sharing his build updates on Twitter/X, it looked like a standard DIY project but then several folks noticed he had a pretty unique computer case that included a built-in LCD screen! The classic grey/yellow screen pictured above running ESXi-Arm looks amazing and certainly useful for those wanting to remove the dependency of an external monitor.

If you are in the market for building or upgrading your homelab and want a unique computer case, check out th Jonsbo D31 which comes in both Black or White with two different models:

Black

White

Cyprien's ESXi-Arm build also recently won the best homelab community build (#3) project that was sponsored by Newegg and Ampere, so congrats on the W! 🥳🖥️🐈‍⬛

VMware Flings Update

by // 25 Comments

This has been a difficult week for all VMware employees due to the pending acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. Many VMware employees are still waiting to hear back from Broadcom about their employment status either before and/or after the planned acquisition close date. I wanted to provide this context before sharing a quick update regarding the VMware Flings program.

On Tuesday October 24th, VMware Fling authors was made aware that the VMware Flings site (flings.vmware.com) would be taken down and website would simply be redirected to developer.vmware.com/samples starting on Thursday October 26th.

The VMware Flings program was operated and run by VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) and while I do not have specifics on why it needed to go down, I tried my best to share out the news as broadly and as quickly as I could so that folks could at least grab what they needed. While the original notice mentioned the site would function up until 10/26 at 5pm PST, it looks VMware IT had already made the DNS changes and the redirect has already been propagated.

As of right now, I do not know the future of the VMware Flings program, but I did want to share a few updates since the site and its downloads are no longer available.

[Read more...]

Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm?

by // 12 Comments

The number of Arm-based hardware kits has grown significantly in the last couple of years. Today, there are many more options to choose from including different form factors and even hardware from some of the more traditional x86 vendors, which also demonstrates the market opportunity and the demand for Arm-based workloads.

Running ESXi-Arm is definitely a great way to bring all the benefits of the VMware ESXi Hypervisor to your Arm-based workloads including leveraging the powerful vSphere platform by connecting that to an x86 vCenter Server.

As of this publishing this blog post (06/01/23), ESXi-Arm supports over a dozen different hardware platforms that spans Datacenter, Near Edge and Far Edge:

If you want to use ESXi-Arm, which is completely free, we definitely recommend looking at this list of Arm hardware kits and you can always find the latest supported Arm-based hardware under the ESXi-Arm Requirements section.

With that said, we continue to see new Arm-based kits and SoCs that are being released on a regular basis and question that I typically see get asked from our customers and field is will this work with ESXi-Arm?

[Read more...]