Home Lab – Page 3

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...]

ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Performance (Scorpion Canyon)

10.15.2024 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In addition to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro (which I recently reviewed), ASUS has also released the ASUS NUC 14 Performance (formally known as Scorpion Canyon) as part of their Intel 14th Generation (Meteor Lake) lineup.

Compared to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro and Pro+, the ASUS NUC 14 Performance offers more powerful CPU options and an additional NVIDIA discrete (mobile) graphics that can be used for a variety of use cases and workloads including the hot topic of AL/ML exploration.

Thanks to the SimplyNUC team who provided me access to the ASUS NUC 14 Performance kit for this review! Let's dive right in 😀

UPDATE (02/20/25) - 128GB (2x64GB) DDR5 SODIMM memory is fully functional with PN64-E1, please see this blog post for more information.

[Read more...]

Updated Dashboard for VMware Community Homelabs using Dashimo

10.09.2024 by William Lam // 1 Comment

While working on some data analysis for an internal project, I was looking for a better way to summarize and provide some visualizations of the raw data for better consumption.

I also wanted to automate this process, so that I could easily build reports or dashboards regardless of the frequency of requests and/or dataset size. After a bit of searching, I came across a very awesome PowerShell Module called Dashimo, which builds on top of another PowerShell Module called PSWriteHTML, which provides a framework for creating HTML reports.

After playing around with Dashimo over the weekend and successfully using it for my internal project, I thought I would update the dashboard I provide today for the VMware Community Homelabs Project, where users from our community can submit their VMware Homelab BOM (Build of Materials) that can benefit the broader community.

I really like the simplicity and ease of use that Dashimo provides and the dashboards that you can build are all interactive, so it is not just a static image. For those interested in seeing Dashimo in action or if you want to check out the new dashboard for the VMware Community Homelabs, you can access it at: https://lamw.github.io/homelab/