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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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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
That doesn’t sound cheap either ?
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom (J.G.Ballard).
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I don’t know the price of the new NCU 14 pro atm but there is different CPUs and it will be better than the microserver CPU I have now. I believe it can go either i7 or i9 CPU maybe?
Not cheap BUT I’m thinking IF it runs from the NAS then effectively, I don’t need the HP Gen10 microserver anymore so I can sell it, I also got a raid card and ilo in it so should hopefully get a few quid back as the raid card alone was over £200!
It also means that I’m no longer tied in to certain hardware like with vmware and it seems proxmox will install on virtually anything, standard desktop, server, I think I read even a mac lol. So it doesn’t seem to be hardware dependant, I guess you just need vpro for the tmp chip for win 11 and prob win 12 and other than that, up to you what you go for, I guess you could even get a normal desktop PC but where my HP microserver is isn’t too much space so don’t want anything bigger than this, could maybe go or a SFF PC if something suitable. Main thing seems to be as much ram as feasibly possible so can run the VMs. Not sure how much impact will have on NAS with VMs running off it as well as saving files and watching content from it but will have to see.
If device had raid i.e. software or similar would be a bonus if proxmox can use it as I could then use nvme drives and would be much faster to run machines or I need to figure out how to backup the VMs as some are effectively fixed i.e. the DC, it’s content doesn’t change but my DB Vm server changes frequently (updates to databases etc) and my MECM will change frequently with new packages, drivers etc so need to ensure its backed up if I run off a single nvme drive but need to look into that more as I believe there is a backup option but unsure how that works. I’m thinking once bought, the box wouldn’t need to be replaced for a fair time as would just need software updating to be able to run new OS’s etc as no longer hardware dependant etc.
Not to mention IF in theory i can by a HP Microserver gen 10+ V2 and move my ilo, rai card over to it and drives, its still going to cost me a few hundred quid to buy it so it might be a similar cost to by the Asus NCU 14+, its a smaller foot print and likely lower power cost than the microserver which i think has a 750w PSU in it? but it doesn’t run at that I don’t believe, it comes on loud at first then quietens right down after 30sec-1min and only gets loud again if temp gets really hot or a component gets really hot. I had it initially with a SSD, nothing wrong with the SSD but it seemed the box didn’t like it as temp went high and fans all kicked in meaning high noise, soon as I changed the SSD into the exact same location and cable, worked fine stayed quiet and been like that for a year or 2 now so just didn’t like that particular SSD for some reason.
Kev
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HP Gen10 microserver + raid card + iLO should fetch at least £250 – 300, hopefully more
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom (J.G.Ballard).
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Let us know when / if you decide to invest
Interesting fact, Proxmox is based / founded in Vienna, Austria and is an open-source server virtualization platform available in 25 languages.
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom (J.G.Ballard).
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