Search Results for: NUC

Supermicro VMware Homelab 2020 Options

12.14.2020 by William Lam // 9 Comments

There are a number hardware options these days when it comes to building a new or upgrading your VMware Homelab. For instance, take a look at the 100+ VMware Community Homelab submissions which can range from $500 up to a whopping $50K. There are many factors that go into deciding what type of system to use and whether you use off the shelf hardware like an Intel NUC or a Supermicro kit or simply build your own.

From my experience, I have found that most folks prefer something that "just works" and for those needing more than 64GB memory, a Supermicro kit is generally preferred. For my personal homelab, I have an E200-8D and is by far it is one of the most popular Supermicro kits for running a VMware Homelab.

One question that I often receive is whether the E200-8D is still a recommended platform and whether there are other updated options? After answering several inquiries, I realize I probably should also do a quick blog post on this topic.

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Quick Tip - How to use Apple Thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter with ESXi 7.0 or greater

11.13.2020 by William Lam // 13 Comments

I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.

Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!

This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.

Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Complete vSphere with Tanzu homelab with just 32GB of memory!

11.09.2020 by William Lam // 43 Comments

Since the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1, the demand and interests from the community on getting hands on with vSphere with Tanzu and the new simplified networking solution, has been non-stop. Most folks are either upgrading their existing homelab or looking to purchase new hardware that can better support the new features of the vSphere 7.0 release.

Although vSphere with Tanzu now has a flavor that does not require NSX-T which helps reduces the barrier on getting started, it still has some networking requirements which may not be easily met in for all lab environments. In fact, this was actually the primary reason I had started to look into this since my personal homelab network is very basic and I do not have nor want a switch that can support multiple VLANs, which is one of the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu.

While investigating for a potential solution, which included way too MANY hours of debugging and troubleshooting, I also thought about the absolute minimal amount of resources I could get away with after put everything together. To be clear, my homelab is comprised of a single Supermicro E200-8D which has 128GB of memory and that has served me well over the years and I highly recommend it for anyone that can fit that into their budget. With that said, I did set out with a pretty aggressive goal of using something that is pretty common in VMware homelabs which is an Intel NUC and with just 32GB of memory.

UPDATE (07/02/24) - As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you no longer have the ability to configure a single Supervisor Control Plane VM using the minmaster and maxmasters parameters, which have also been removed from /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml in favor of allowing users to control this configuration programmatically as part of enabling vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere with Tanzu). The updated vSphere IaaS API that allows users to specify number of Supervisor Control Plane VM will not be available until the next major vSphere release. While this regressed capability is unfortunate, it was also not an officially supported configuration and for users who wish to specify the number of Supervisor Control Plane VM using YAML method, you will need to use an earlier version of vSphere.

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