@scottalanmiller said in VMware Community Homelabs: @Pete-S said in VMware Community Homelabs: @Dashrender said in VMware Community Homelabs: @Pete-S said in VMware Community Homelabs: Most IT people I know get their hardware for nothing where they work. So they have stuff like R710's at home. So setting up a home lab isn't a cost thing, more a question of having the space. The cost of power to run that 710 can likely make it more cost effective to run the VMs in a VPS. plus that gets rid of the noise pollution. Depends on how many VMs you have. A R710 can easily handle twenty of those $5 vultr VMs. That's $1200 per year for VMs in a VPS. No way you can rack up that in electricity. Plus the needs of a lab VM are often very different from the needs of a production one. Prod needs fast disks and fast CPU, and "just enough" RAM. Labs need very little CPU and disk performance, but lots of RAM. And just one workload like NextCloud could cost a fortune on even Vultr, but be nearly free on an R710. We have old R510 units that could run 30+ VMs, easily. A good 50% more than @Pete-S is estimating. And adding RAM alone would allow us to up that number significantly. If I need a bunch of VMs to test/lab things, I'll use Hyper-V on my laptop (shouldn't have to mention this, but I"m sure it'll be pointed out- not talking about platform labs here). Lots of RAM in PCs is much more doable now, and can take you pretty far. Some business laptops give you 64 GB of ram.... that's more than enough to set up some labs.

@wrx7m said in VMware Host Cannot Connect from vSphere Client: Could also be an issue if a vendor-specific ISO was used to initially install ESXi. I ran into a similar problem with Dell; I had to get the Dell ISO from their downloads for the specific server model/service tag. For 6.0 this is fine (you'll use this to get ASNC drivers). You can also add the dell VIB depot to get them this way also. For 6.7 Dell has (thankfully) stopped shipping ASYNC drivers and moved 100% to inbox. It's all for 3rd party management VIBs. Honestly I've seen 3rd party VIBs be a culprit for updates before. I'd make sure you are updating the BIOS/FIrmware also when updating ESXi (People forget this sometimes).

@rhya said in alternative way to copy stuff with read access: I am using fedora 22. Fedora 31 is current. F22 is insanely ancient.

@Pete-S said in Comparing Server CPU Capabilities?: @wrx7m said in Comparing Server CPU Capabilities?: ... And I don't have to run a Windows server for vCenter server or upgrade manager anymore. I haven't played around with VMware much. How does it work with vCenter? Does run in a VM on each hypervisor or completely separate from the hypervisors? It is a virtual appliance. You can upgrade and migrate from an existing Windows version. You can run it on a single server.

@Dashrender said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?: @Pete-S said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?: @wrx7m said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?: @Pete-S said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?: @wrx7m said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?: @Pete-S They list both the 61xx and 62xx as options for the R740XD. Good! What CPUs do you have in the R720 today? 1 or 2 CPUs? Do you want the new ones to be faster or just capable of running more VMs? I have 2 x E5-2609 CPUs in each server. I would like faster, but more VMs would be the priority. The E5-2609 CPUs are at the low end of what was available at the time so no problem there. Actually, are you looking to keep the old servers around for testing and such? In that case you could just drop in refurbished CPUs that are faster and/or has more cores for very little money. If the server can take E5-2600 V2 you can get up to 12 core CPUs. yeah, but Windows licensing is an issue, assuming multiple CPUs... for a test server, not likely worth going over the 16 cores. Not to mention the test server might require licensing (if needed beyond the 90 day test period for something). Two 8-cores would be an option. For instance two E5-2690. They are 2.9 GHz base frequency and have 8 cores. About $100 each when buying refurbished. About 50% faster per core (2609 have no turbo) and about 3 times faster multicore performance. Has more cache and faster memory transfer speed. Was a very high end CPU at the time. Was listed at $2000 while the E5-2609 was $300. The fastest 8-core E5-2600 V2 CPU is the E5-2667 V2. 8 cores and base frequency of 3.3 GHz. It will likely also be an option for the R720XD. V2 uses 22nm technology so uses less power with the same clock speed and can fit more cores or run higher frequencies.