WilliamLam.com

Potentially interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2022

by // 32 Comments

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting hardware platforms that can benefit the VMware Homelab Community. In the month of January, there were a number of new announcements that I had been following including news from the Computer Electronic Show (CES) but also a couple of product releases from vendors that I had not heard of before until most recently.

While the global silicon shortage is still a very real challenge, here are some of the new and upcoming hardware platforms that I think could potentially be interesting for VMware Homelabs in 2022. The list below is not exhaustive and I primarily focused on platforms that offers a unique or interesting capability based on the various requirements that I have heard from the community over the years. As an example, I know some of you have expressed interests in platforms that are capable of supporting full length discrete GPU for VDI, AL/ML and Kubernetes-based workloads to a platform that can enable more advanced networking features with multiple onboard network adapters.

If there are other platforms that I or the community should definitely keep an eye out for in 2022, feel free to leave a comment with a pointer to the reference. I will periodically update this article with additional new systems, so definitely bookmark this page and check back frequently.

[Read more...]

USB Network Adapters without using the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

by // 25 Comments

While browsing the (unofficial) VMware Reddit this morning and came across a thread where the OP was asking for a recommendation on USB network adapters that can be used with ESXi with their Intel NUC, which many replied with their recommendations and a pointer over to the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling, which would be required if you are using one of the supported chipsets.

The community already covered all the basics and I did not have anything to add until I saw the following comment:

To my knowledge at least, there are zero drivers for USB network interfaces without using a fling.

Although this was certainly true a few years back, that the only way for ESXi to see a USB network adapter was to first install the USB Network Native Driver, this is technically no longer accurate due to some recent enhancements with ESXi that may not be very well known.

[Read more...]

Creating a VMFS datastore greater than 2TB on a USB device in ESXi

by // 12 Comments

I recently had an inquiry from one of our Technical Account Managers (TAM) with an interesting question from their customer. They were looking to manually migrate VMs from one environment to another and because these were isolated and secured environments, they were looking to use an encrypted USB device that would be formatted with VMFS. While researching this topic, they came across several mentions in the community that VMFS on USB has a 2TB limitation, which was not going to work for them.

I personally have never tried nor had the need to ever create a VMFS datastore that was greater than 2TB on a USB device, but I have certainly heard simliar claims in the past and this finally piqued my interests. I reached out to a few folks within VMware Engineering that works on our USB stack and came to learn that is no such limitation when using VMFS on USB. In fact, they also pointed out that some of the reported errors in the community was most likely due to hardware issues rather than capacity of the underlying USB device. This was actually great news and of course I wanted to verify for myself before replying back.

First off, VMFS on USB is NOT officially supported by VMware, so I just want to make sure that is clear. With that said, this is a fairly common practice within the community, especially for VMware Homelabs which I have also demonstrated this capability as early as 2011 and most recently in 2015 for use with vSAN and in 2020 for a vSAN Witness with ESXi on Arm. While most USB storage devices, especially those found in the consumer space are not durable enough for Enterprise usage, it does NOT mean you can not have a reliable USB storage device. I actually wrote about this topic a few years back where you can use inexpensive M.2 enclosures to house an NVMe device that can then be connected via USB/USB-C to have a more reliable storage medium that can also be cost effective.

[Read more...]