Homelab

An ode to joy – or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi

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An ode to joy, or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi. An obituary.

But before I go into depth here, I would like to declare the following:

This blog post is reflecting my personal opinion. Based on my knowledge and experience, as well as the things I have read on the internet and heard from people directly and discussed with them, I have written this blog post.

The title of this blog post says a lot. At least I think so. And I’m glad you stumbled across this blog post or clicked the link wherever it has been posted. In the last few days, there has been a lot of reading about the fact that VMware by Broadcom has canceled the free ESXi hypervisor. And yes, that may not be the fine English way to mash such a product. I don’t even know if there is a “good” way to do something like that.

Yes. It’s bad that the “free ESXi” has been canceled. At least according to what I read about on X (Twitter) and some IT news portals. People were (and still are) angry about this move of thinning out the product portfolio. I never used this free version, and I wasn’t even aware that this was such a big thing. But that doesn’t count here.

Yes. There are alternative hypervisors, like Hyper-V, Proxmox, and others, and they are free. You can run virtual machines even on storage systems like TrueNAS or Unraid (the last one does cost some bucks). And a free hypervisor, I don’t care about the flavor, might be just enough for some people. They may run a homelab with some VMs, maybe some production services for their home network like Pi-Hole, to name one.

But this is it.

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New homelab hardware installed – HP Z8 G4 workstation

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I may have skipped some homelab generation upgrades in my documentation here. However I have updated the page as far as I could, and I would like to provide you with a brief update on my current homelab setup with this blog post as well.

Last year, my wife and I moved into our own house. Yes, I married my love and we built a house. I didn’t shout about it because it’s something personal and I don’t have to rub it in everyone’s face. But yes, I’m a married house owner now and a loving father. Oh, I forgot to mention that my wife gave birth to a beautiful son this year. So many things happened! But anyway, back to topic.

You may have seen some images I posted on Twitter last year, about the huge IT rack I got my hands on, and the first “production” deployment in my new homelab rack. This “production” deployment was an actual beer fridge that was small enough to fit into that rack. If you don’t believe me, please go ahead and check the pictures here. The beer fridge is still there, but the huge and heavy IT rack has gone. The huge rack has been replaced by a desktop-size rack from StarTech.com. This rack is enough to provide a nice mount for my SuperMicro servers and networking equipment.

But the main topic in this blog post is the recently acquired hardware. I bought a refurbished HP Z8 G4 workstation!

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My homelab got an upgrade – Intel Optane SSDs!

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I didn’t blog about it until yet because I didn’t have the time to install, test and troubleshoot. Also, I didn’t have much time for writing because I was busy with private and business things. But just recently I found time to do some homelabbing and test some things.

May I introduce you: Intel Optane SSDs!

A while ago, the vExpert community got the opportunity to apply for Intel Optane SSDs. I thought why not? They can always say no. So I applied for three Intel Optane SSDs. And I was one of the chosen ones. Sure, this sounds cheesy, but I don’t know how many vExperts finally got some disks.

Through the vExpert program, we had the possibility to choose between the 2.5″ U.2 P4800X 375 GB SSD or its PCIe counterpart. I applied for the U.2 disk. If only I had known what I was getting myself into…

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Changing FRU information on Supermicro servers

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This blog post is not just for fun but because of a reason. I reinstalled my three Supermicro homelab servers with vSphere 7, and during setup, I noticed that ESXi shows incorrect values for the server model. What could cause this?

No, it shouldn’t be a “Super Server”, even if Supermicro servers are super for homelabs. But it should be an “SYS-300-8D” as this is the model I bought.

So how can I fix this? The short answer is: there is no fix until today, unfortunately. I tried it and asked also some fellow VMware friends, but still no success. It seems that this might a bug or something. I don’t know what values are read from ESXi to display that. And even after I changed the FRU values with the IPMICFG tool, reboot, and reinstalled the ESXi, the values were still displayed wrong. But at least I learned some new things during that troubleshooting. And I wanted to put the lessons learned into a blog post. Just in case you have similar issues, or you want to do the same things.

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My homelab hardware gets its own rack

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This project started a long time ago. When I planned the hardware needs for my homelab, I also thought of getting a rack. I had a real IT rack in mind, as you know it from your daily business, maybe back in the days when at least some stuff was on-premises and not everything in the cloud. I wanted to get a small rack with enough space to mount my whole homelab hardware into it, to have a proper cabling solution, and to have flexibility in case my homelab gets an extension.

But that wasn’t easy. There are various flavors of racks. The normal 42 unit IT rack, half-hight racks, and also various wall-mountable racks for patch panels, switches, and smaller devices. I was thinking and tinkering, looking for specs. But in the end, nothing satisfied me. Well, at least not from a price perspective, of being not able to transport it. And then, there was something going on on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/widmerkarl/status/1175392396974145542

Thanks to my colleague Michael Schroeder I’ve found something. He mentioned his IKEA rack, and that made me curious. Earlier in June, my colleague Fred Hofer announced that he moved his hardware into a bigger rack and that it was easier as when he moved from an IKEA Lack rack to the small rack:

https://twitter.com/Fred_vBrain/status/1267580223727550470

And that was the trigger! Why not building my own rack and tailor it to my needs? I don’t have to spend much money on a real IT rack, and I can do something handcrafted. The rack didn’t have to be anything special, there was not much in my personal specification book.

That’s the specifications planned:

  • Small (not full 42 rack units)
  • It should be lightweight
  • Enough space for at least three servers, some switches, and a NAS (or two)
  • Enough space for future homelab upgrades
  • Extensible, if needed
  • Should withstand some weight
  • Wheels!

The idea of building my own IKEA Lack Rack was born.

This whole homelab IKEA Lack Rack story will be covered in a small blog series. This blog post will start the series with some planning stuff, the first pictures, and the BOM, as far as I can provide it already. At least the BOM will be updated if there is a reason for it.

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