Hi all,
So it seems vmware is now stopping the free ESXi versions and it seems alot of people are now looking at alternative hypervisors.
It woould appear that I could potentially install ESXi on a drive in the box and then have my VMs on a iSCSI LUN which points to my NAS box and effectively I add that iSCSi LUN as a datastore to esxi and then it will see the VMS on the NAS box and it will run them from the NAS box. This i presume means no need for a RAID card in the esxi box and only 1 drive for the OS as VMs will be on my NAS box which is already in raid5.
Only issue I forsee is the potential slowness of it running over the LAN? Plus NAS is still using HDDs.
I see the Asus NUC 14 pro is coming out at some point (not seen any dates yet, any one know?), not sure if has hardware raid in it but it has capacity for I believe 3 drives and its much smaller and more importantly can had 96GB ram I believe?
So i been looking and considering if ESXi is no longer going to be free and you can bet esxi 8 wont do win 12 clients so will need to move to presumably esxi9, maybe an alternative would be best such as proxmox I believe is another hypervisor and is free open source and has option to pay or access to repositories (not entirely sure what these are all for) but the key part is I believe it is free and has a small footprint/usage so light on memory etc so always a good thing, it’s what made me choose vmware initially the low memory usage for the OS and small foot print on the drive as opposed to hyperV which requires windows server and then you add it on, which I believe they are now removing from the OS and it will be a kind of add on? maybe additional cost? not sure.
To my knowledge the NUCs don’t have raid so means effectively doing the same thing, setting up ISCSI LUN to nas and storing VMs there. Plus side being with 96GB ram, I can run the VMS i need to without issues.
I have now setup a vcenter VM on my existing box but with my DC, DB, VC running I’m pretty much maxed out the memory….
vcenter 12GB,
DB 8GB or 12GB,
DC 4GB.
MECM 12GB
So as you can see I effectively cannot run my MECM without turning off the vcenter VM.
So I effectively need 40GB ram to run those vms plus another GB or 2 for the OS and then another few GBs to run client VMs to play around with MECM and deploying OS/apps etc to so I think 96GB might be a bit overkill at the moment but you never know what VMs i may need in the future and what requirements will be in future updates of apps/OS/DBs etc.
Kev
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