Planning on building a homelab

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marcel

New Member
Oct 15, 2016
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Hi,

I'm starting a new project I want to build a home lab where I want to virtualize most stuff.

Probably I'm going to buy new hardware and use the Xeon D platform.

Also I want to upgrade my network. I'm considering Ubiquiti network gear. I already have UAP AC Pro and it does it's job okay.

At the moment I have a unRAID server but I want to ditch unRAID. I want more stable software for my shared storage. I have a second server running ProxmoxVE (testing).

Software that I want to use daily: Plex, PlexPy, Sonarr etc.


I read that a lot of people use vSphere. Why is vSphere so populair? I must admit I have no experience with vSphere. My opinion is that ProxmoxVE works very good but of course I can't make a comparison.
 

RobertFontaine

Active Member
Dec 17, 2015
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Winterpeg, Canuckistan
Many of the guys willing to dump dollars into a home lab are IT professionals who have corporate environments where they are also working in so popularity is likely related to what you have in your server room and where you can obtain your licencing from.

Assuming you are going the route of
Type 1 Hypervisor then:
Xen
KVM
Hyper-V
ESXi

Proxmox VE is a flavour of KVM

Each has its own distinct quirks and mostly you are going to have to consider your own use cases and actually try them to decide what your preference is.

My development team prefers VMWare Workstation for VM's so building my homelab for ESXi is an easy decision. Despite the fact that the team develops Microsoft Based software and we leverage Azure the Desktop and Hardware support that ESXi provides to the VM's seems to be more mature for our use cases than Hyper-V.

Licencing features of ESXi can become obscene. The VMWare User Group provides for an annual licencing of $200 for the homelab environment which is good for playing and we don't need most of the enterprise management features so we are good.

If and when we need the more robust enterprise feature I hope we are rich or we will likely have to rethink the virtualization platform. Conceptually I prefer an open source infrastructure but thinks like SLA's and Hardware agreements often block these entirely.
 

marcel

New Member
Oct 15, 2016
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Hi Robert thank you for your explanation/comment!

Yeah indeed I read on Tweakers that there is option for a VMUG license. Good to know if you choose the ESXi route.

One of the things I dislike about ESXi is that you need a VM with vSphere for licensing. Licensing okay but why using a VM?

If I'm correct ESXi is supporting Docker containers via Photon OS. So ESXi also have interesting features. I must say I'm curious what version 6.5 of ESXi brings.
 

TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
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One of the things I dislike about ESXi is that you need a VM with vSphere for licensing. Licensing okay but why using a VM?

Uhh..., nope. For a standalone host, you just need to use one of the supported clients (eg. web-access built into 6.0 U2 or newer) to enter the key. For a multiple-host setup with a vCenter controlling them all, then there is a license server built into vCenter - put all of your keys in there and the hosts can consume licenses from it when they are added.
 

marcel

New Member
Oct 15, 2016
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Thanks TuxDude for clarifying I misunderstood this. This confirms that I have very little knowledge of ESXi...

Is it possible with VMware Fusion (Mac user) to play a bit with ESXi? I know its possible with VMware workstation.