I'm repurposing my Microserver Gen8 from a Lubuntu-based NAS to an ESXi host. I will shortly be upgrading it with a Xeon E3-1265L v2, 16GB RAM and a Samsung 870 QVO 1TB SSD. It has 4 SATA data drives, which I plan to leave in place, as one of my guest VMs will continue to act as a Lubuntu-based file server. I plan to put my guest VMs on the SSD.
I plan to have 2 guest VMs:
- Windows Server 2008 running Blue Iris IP camera monitoring software. This tends to be quite CPU-intensive
- Lubuntu 20.04 hosting the following:
- file server
- Logitech Media Server
- Home Assistant (home automation server)
- Mediawiki.
My questions are:
1. Which version of ESXi would be best for my needs? I have downloaded "HPE Gen9 Plus Custom Image for ESXi 6.7 Update 3" from the VMWare site in anticipation, as from reading other posts it seems that it might perform better than v7 with the SSD, but I'm not sure if that's definitive advice.
2. Would it make much difference whether I ran ESXi from a USB stick or an SD card?
I plan to have 2 guest VMs:
- Windows Server 2008 running Blue Iris IP camera monitoring software. This tends to be quite CPU-intensive
- Lubuntu 20.04 hosting the following:
- file server
- Logitech Media Server
- Home Assistant (home automation server)
- Mediawiki.
My questions are:
1. Which version of ESXi would be best for my needs? I have downloaded "HPE Gen9 Plus Custom Image for ESXi 6.7 Update 3" from the VMWare site in anticipation, as from reading other posts it seems that it might perform better than v7 with the SSD, but I'm not sure if that's definitive advice.
2. Would it make much difference whether I ran ESXi from a USB stick or an SD card?