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ESXi on Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra

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After getting hands on with the Lenovo P3 Tiny, which was my first time experiencing a Lenovo kit, I was recommended by the Lenovo team to also check out its larger and more powerful sibling the Lenovo P3 Ultra.


While many of the smaller form factor systems have gotten more capable over the years, especially the classic 4x4 kits, they do have their limits in terms resources and expandability.

It has been some time since I have looked at larger kits but after glancing at the P3 Ultra specs, I can see why the Lenovo team thought this might be of interests to the VMware Community, especially with all the additional capabilities, packed into a larger but still pretty compact form factor design.

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ESXi on SolidRun V3000

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The name SolidRun is no stranger to the VMware ecosystem, both the Honeycomb LX2 and MacchiatoBin are two popular Arm platforms that are used with the ESXi-Arm Fling, especially for development and testing purposes.

However, what I did not know about SolidRun was that they also catered to the x86 market, which I recently came to learn about with their launch of the Bedrock V3000 (AMD Zen 3) and V7000 (AMD Zen 4) platforms respectively.

Given the opportunity to get hands on with one of the SolidRun x86 kits, the V3000, I knew I had to take it for a spin!


After unboxing the V3000, the first thing that immediately stands out is the overall build quality and aesthetics. The system is truly beautiful to look at and hold, not words I typically use to describe a server 🙂 The V3000 is not for a typical homelab, it is designed to run in harsh and demanding industrial type environments, especially those found at the Edge.

The unique fanless design and cooling of the V3000 enables it to be deployed to a number of locations, including ruggedized environments where traditional mounting kits may not be available and the use of DIN-Rail are required. Another thing that stood out to me while reading about the V3000, is the modularity of their platform where you can easily add a Networking and I/O board (NIO), Storage and Extension Cards board (SX) and Power Module (PM) to address your different use cases and requirements.

Lets now take a closer look at running ESXi on the V3000!

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Synology DS723+ in Homelab

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While I am a huge fan and a happy user of vSAN in my homelab environment, it can sometimes be challenging when you only have a single node (yes, this is not a best practice nor recommended). For example, I have not been able to upgrade to the latest vSAN Disk Group version because my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is also running on top of vSAN which prevents the upgrade operation from completing as changes to the vSAN Disk Group is required.


I honestly have been putting this maintenance off for quite some time but right before VMware Explore, I got an opportunity from Synology to check out one of their storage offerings, the DS723+. While I have never worked with a Synology product before, I know many in the VMware Community use their DiskStation NAS for a number of use cases from VM/Application backup, file sharing, and certainly external storage for ESXi. I also found it interesting that you can also run certain types of applications directly on the NAS, which certainly pique my interest 🙂

With VMware Explore US now behind us, I finally got a chance to play with the DS723+ which has the following configuration:

Note: For those interested, there is also DS723+ bundle (includes 2 x 4TB SATA disk) on Amazon

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