Advice- esxi upgrade vs other

[marcoi]

I have some time off from work and want to use it to do some maintenance on my two servers. Right now they are running esxi v 6 with vcenter. I have a license from VMUG which expires in April. My options are upgrade to 6.5 since it just was released on VMUG or move onto a different platform such as Proxmox. I been trying to decide if it's worth it to pay for another year for VMUG or move onto the free VM platform.

Some details.
I have two nodes:
Node 1: E3-12xx CPU with 32GB ram.
VM on it: I run WS2012R2 Essentials with pass through LSI card that is built into the MB and usb 3 card which i use to connect a USB HDD for quartly backups.. The LSI card is flashed in IT mode. I also have a minecraft server, sophos router and vcenter application running on it.

Node 2: Dual E5-26xx with 128GB ram. I have one raid cards and usb 3 card all on pass through. One raid card flashed to IT mode goes to freenas which has some old drives that i share out to linux hosts for storage. The other raid card is used to create a raid for VMs to live on. It has 3 x 3TB Red HDD with a 1GB SSD cache made up of 4 256GB consumer SSD drives in Raid 10. The usb 3 card is pass to a windows 8 VM and has an external 4TB USB Drive that is used for storage.
As for VMs on this server, I have 1 Windows 8 used for work, 1 WS2012R2 used for dev, 1 minecraft server, freenas, pfsense, and about 10 or so ubuntu servers that have various software builds on it ( Websphere, DB2, etc.) these last VMs aren't always on, unless I'm actively working on them.

As for backups. Only node 1 has XSIbackup running on it. When node 2 was setup and I started to use it with out setting up a real backup option. I would like to have some backups of VMs i spent a lot of time installing software on. I been looking at XSIbackup pro for 105 USD and free version of Veeam for backup options to automate it.


Options / Advise
Option 1- If I stay with Vmware, my expense will be 200 for VMUG and possibly the 105 for XSIbackup ( I might go with free version). I can upgrade to version 6.5 (unless someone notes it will break any of the passthrough i listed above.)

option 2- Move everything over to Proxmox. Proxmox seems to have built in backup of VMs. It also seems to be way more hands on then ESXI, especially when it comes to pass through. I played with basics in Virtualbox so I haven't really tried all the pass-through tests.

Option 3 - You guys give me some suggestions.

Let me know what you think.

PS i also though of consolidating down all storage, etc. but i dont feel comfortable having one huge storage pool for everything. I rather keep the various functions for storage all distinct. IE WS2012R2 essentials is used for all my home media and backup of PCs. So that is the most important data. My Work related data is stored on external usb3 drive, etc..

 

[sth]

Im not the most experienced user here but Ive just moved from Proxmox to ESXI 6.5 primarily for performance and PCI passthrough reliability. Using FreeNAS under proxmox delivered poor performance when connected to my motherboard LSI ports (x9srl-f) and worse caused metadata corruption when passing through LSI HBA (9300-8i). Also had issues with PCI passthrough with OmniOS/Nappit so in the end decided to head to ESXI which seems to be dealing with things much better.

 

[Rand__]

First, I have no experience with Promoxx, but I'd assume it will do its basic job.
So the basic question is - do you want to shell out $200 for a little comfort and optimization and less hassle or do you want to try out new stuff?
1. How valuable is you time - how much of it do you need to migrate to Promoxx?
2. Do you want to learn Promoxx for the sake of it?
3. Can you take down one of your hosts to give Promoxx a whirl before committing?

4. Have you considered using some of the other VMUG licensed products to get a better value out of the package? (For learning purposes or might be useful tools in there)

I personally would stay with ESX i think, but I use VMUG primarily for the VDI licenses

 

[marcoi]

For now I plan to stay with ESXI and work on upgrading to 6.5. I will then setup proxmox on a test box and play around with it while i still have the vmug subscription.

Thanks everyone for their feedback.

 

[fractal]

Do you use the system for anything commercial that would violate the terms of free esx licenses?

Do you use the system that needs more than what you get from free esx licenses?

I use free esx at home and it does pretty much everthing I need. I bought the hardware to set up a small proxmox cluster to give it a go but haven't done it yet. I briefly considered a license from my local VMUG but don't have the time to take advantage of it at the moment.

 

[marcoi]

Q: Do you use the system for anything commercial that would violate the terms of free esx licenses?
A:No I don't. I been using the free esxi since version 4 at home. Only started using vcenter (VMUG) last year due to the limitations of version 6 if you didn't have access to vcenter.

Q: Do you use the system that needs more than what you get from free esx licenses?
A: vcenter allows me central management of my two soon to be three server nodes. I like the ability to move VMS over to different servers. Not a big deal to not have it but also not bad learning more about vcenter.

Q: I use free esx at home and it does pretty much everthing I need. I bought the hardware to set up a small proxmox cluster to give it a go but haven't done it yet. I briefly considered a license from my local VMUG but don't have the time to take advantage of it at the moment.

A: I been playing around with esxi 6.5 on my third setup. Basically converting a htpc with e3-1265l CPU and a m-itx gaming motherboard over to htpc VM and Nas application that was included with xsibackup pro which will be used as a dumping area for VM backups. The Nas has a nice feature like deduplication to reduce storage space. The htpc VM will have either a Nvidia 750 TI card which I got somewhat working in passthrough mode or an AMD to 290x which I tested without issues as a backup if the Nvidia card isn't reliable enough.
Esxi 6.5 has a nice built in gui to control the individual nodes. I might not renew VMUG this year if the interface provides enough control. I still have to get vcenter upgraded and tested out though before i decide on VMUG.

Update - i got the Nvidia 750 TI to passthrough I had to do a few things to get it working. like disable the Integrated Graphics in the BIOS. So the 750 TI initializes with boot. I had to manually edit the esxi.config file to enable Nvidia card as pass through device. in the VM settings I had to enable Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS under the CPU, reserve all memory since i am using more than 2GB, and edit the configure parameters of the vm adding hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FASLE. After that I had to install VNC, Nvidia drivers, then completely disable the console display to get it stable. I'm moving onto setting up the second VM for XSINAS now. I need a few parts from amazon to convert the motherboards mini pcie from wifi card over to pcie 1 slot and add a usb3 card so i can pass through the keyboard and other usb devices to the htpc vm.