VMWare ESXi Server Build, Homelab Edition

Looking at building your own #VMWare #ESXi hypervisor server for your #Homelab or #SMB? In this video I walk through the hardware choices for my custom built ESX server.

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I have always had multiple VMBox projects on my main and secondary desktop PCs and even one or two light weight Ubuntu VMs on my laptop. At a certain point I knew I needed to centralize all of this some how to more efficiently allocate system resources. By day, I work in IT (so by night I can work on YT) and building a server like this seemed like a great idea to learn basic concepts around virtualization, networking, storage, and overall system management.

This server is running a Supermicro X10DRi motherboard with two Xeon E5-2660v3 CPUs. Right now I have 64GB of DDR4 registered ECC memory installed. I have a few PCIe cards installed already, some for passthrough to specific VMs and some for the system as a whole.

Gaming PC Build list:

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Music Provided by YouTube Audio Library License:
The DeLong Incident by Craig MacArthur

[gojira]

Saw u on Reddit, great vid...subscribed

[muelmanu]

Hahaha your home looks like the Chaos Computer Congress BackYard xD
Really cool setup.

[KaidoFujimi]

Are you strictly passing through the GPU to a specific VM? VMWare are pretty tight fisted when it comes to using accelerator cards unless they are on the compliant list of GRIDs and Teslas. I understand however if you are strictly exclusively passing resources of a GPU to a singular VM using passthrough mode without the need for services like vGPU or virtual desktop applications enabled in ESXi, would I be correct in assuming that this shouldn't prohibit you from using the GPU in that regard? I mean it's clear whatever you're doing is working. I'd like to use some of my Tesla K80's for a project but I'd like to have a bit more solid information before I even deem it worth a try. You know the whole debacle of taking a server offline. Any downtime is a bad time. If you have any feedback, I'd sure appreciate it!

[patatopc]

Hey I am thinking making a cheap pc to use as a server are you able to make a tutorial on how to do this or got any tips you can tell me

[didnthurt]

You think this could work with an external graphics card?

[mrbazzzinga]

Your eletric bill must be $500-1000 month