Is VMware Making A Huge Mistake With vSphere 7?
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- čas přidán 17. 03. 2021
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Wow that was the most sophisticated complaint I have ever heard in my life.
Hahahaha :D This is "I want to speak to the manager" in sophisticated LOL
01:08 thanks for the Dramble shout-out! Ha! And 08:15 :)
Epic share mate thanks
I love your sweatshirt. Can I get it with an asterisk that says, "Unless you're my grandparents."
Aw that would be an awesome shirt ~ Editor Amber
@@Level1Techs I would come home from college and have to program my grandparents VCR or figure out their computer issues.
Why not "Yes, I will fix your computer... by installing Linux"
My first department was IT, but only because they didn't know where to put myself or my supervisor. Suddenly everyone I kmew thought I was the help desk.
I won't even flinch when I see a VMWare press release titled - "VMWare releases Per Byte Storage Licensing for vSAN!" 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 it's coming
From just $0.02 per megabyte*....
*Charged in petabyte increments.
something I noticed, you misspoke at the beginning, every ESXi install has vSphere, you need vCenter to control multiple hosts
But limited by license or no license.
ProxMox is very capable and just became more attractive to home lab admins with this move.
Wendell you really hit the nail on the head with this video and I hope the heads at vmware see this. Homelabs are having to be thrown out cause storage controllers, cpus and nics are not supported in 7.0. Frustrated!
@@pinned.by.nuggetsnews6677 The comment was not for you! It was for @Level1Techs
@@clintbishop9145 it's clearly spam, suggest you report it if not already ;)
VMWARE does not maintain their own HCL. That is left completely to the vendors. An obvious Achilles Heel and the reason we're leaving VMWARE this year.
Dell and VMware are doing a good job killing off all of the old PowerEdge systems running small branch offices. Plus having to upgrade to 7 when you barely just upgraded to 6.7 is a pain.
@@ClayinSWVA the Dell pe7xx series has been really great overall and well supported for the most part. Much less headache than HP on the secondary mkt. Hard to complain about them, really. But VMWARE handing the keys to the vSAN platform over to hardware manufacturers is nutso.
Your hundred present right Wendell its a shame that vmware dont think about the homelab people. I am now a vmware system consultant and i learned all my knowledge on old hardware and i am having a vsphere 7 course right know and even the trainers dont like when i mention linux there is bad culture going on in related to vmware right know i suspect. But the guys in my team hired me because of my linux knowledge so thats is nice. And i want to so say that i am grateful you inspired me to work in IT and since tek syndicate days and now i have a it job :)
They talked about Tanzu yet? Looks really cool and have seen some demos but I cannot feel I can trust it just yet, especially for prod workloads.
The NFS storage was originally a VMware fling I believe, just like the html5 client before they ditched flash (at last).
@@Englishneo2k tanzu was originally pivotal tech then VMware did buy them and named it tanzu so I have seen pivotal in prod so it should work. But my company is testing out rancher k3s so it's promising when it comes to as good base system to deliver service.
Thanks for the video/update Wendel, I have a home lab myself that I'm putting together as my office no longer offers one specifically
to expand my skills. Changes like this are pretty disruptive so its good to have a heads up when changes like this do occur.
You are spot on. A decade+ of homelab with ESX and ESX at work and here I am in 2021 shutting down my ESX home setup and migrating to appliances amd NUCs running HyperV. Its unfortunate but its becoming too painful and I can see us moving to HyperV at work (we've kept the bean counters at bay so far) for similar reasons. I think vmware will be the company that kills vmware tbh.
I still use Workstation pro. We do "air gap" security and have to support products for over 10 years. so we want to archive the tools in a VM so we can keep supporting products even after the manufactures installer no longer works. For example Visual studio 2019 has to download the debug symbols and the help files from the internet. Then once that is all done the VM can be moved to a computer in the secure area.
whenever a new VIsual Studio comes out, I build myself an offline installer that no longer requires internet access - sure it takes 30-40GB of hard drive (or USB drive) space, but it means that I can install it anywhere without concerning myself about downloads or internet access.
You should engage william lam (virtuallyghetto). he's a solid voice inside VMware (notice the w) and has pushed for lots of homelab unofficial support over the years.
Hell yeah! He's been a great advocate and I think he's been the main voice (that I've seen) pushing for ESXi on ARM
I'm doing a VMWare ESXi upgrade to 7.0 this weekend for my company on a few servers. We decided our legacy data center only needs a free license now since we've mostly moved to AWS. We'll see how the boss enjoys trying to do backups and stuff on the free license without the storage API access now on 7.0.
😅 have fun backing up all your VMs with WinSCP
@@Felix-ve9hs I'm hoping I might be able to run a little Linux VM that will cronjob backups of the disks lol -_-
@@chbrules yeah, good luck on that.
Free vsphere license didn't have storage API access on 6.7 / 6.5 / etc either (although there's a free 30 day eval of the license with the storage API)
@@VeganSurf We've been running on 6.0 licensed.
I've somehow missed your channel. I'm subscribed now. And I've been screaming at the top of my lungs over this. How is our youth supposed to learn if they hide the product behind a pay wall and make support for older hardware non existent? How can we expect new people to learn VMware products from a 60 day eval license? VMUG is $200 dollars per year. The free versions of esxi are too locked down to learn anything advanced. It's the worst business model for upcoming IT professionals. I know more guys with Hyper V training than VMware because Microsoft is an easier home lab experience with both hardware and evaluation licensing. If you are in college then most of the Microsoft products are free of cost for home use and learning with an edu account. All kinds of devices were lost in vSphere 7: nics, raid controllers, hba's, chipsets, cpu's, etc. At this point, I wish they would pick some specific manufacturer and vendors for consumer grade hardware that would be supported for all Vsphere products. Give me an i5, i7, ryzen, and a few consumer grade motherboards in the VMware compatibility list. It would be for personal use only. Get rid of VMUG price tag and make it free for home users. The young will never learn VMware products if we keep locking down the platform.
Edit: Don't even get me started on VMware certifications or taking a $4000 dollar 1 week class that is required before you can take the $125 dollar foundation exam and the additional $250 dollar for the VCP Professional exam. And for the record, a one week class on anything will never prep you to take a final exam or be able to retain it in long term memory. All I can say is thank god my employer paid for it because I never would have. I could take an entire semester of college classes for $4,000 dollars... I'm a little heated. Time to make some tea, watch some anime, and chill to edm music in the background.
Virtualization: One of my favorite topics
Great video! As a homelab enthusiast and an VMware admin, its good to see some some of these complaints made more public. CPU support hit home here...
I sunset'd VMware and moved our production to Hyper-V. Yeah, there is a learning curve, but you get more for less. And in terms of virtualizing Windows, it's really good.
For homelab I tried XCP-ng which is pretty cool, but I ended up on ProxMox because of the built in storage. I need hyperconverged infrastructure. Native docker is all it's missing.
This right here is why I made the move to Proxmox. For my at-home "production" VM's, I lost too much compatibility with VMware. Proxmox fits the bill very nicely. What's nice is that I can still virtualize a little ESXi cluster within Proxmox and maintain at least some level of experience that way. Sure, I would prefer to just pay $200/year for VMUG and have a ton of bells/whistles and just run ESXi, but I don't love the idea of needing all/mostly new host hardware to do that. Proxmox certainly has different terminology for things, but many of the fundamental concepts are the same, so I still feel like I gain experience using a non-VMware product as the host OS. Very well put-together video, as always! I hope VMware makes a return to the home lab!
I'd love to see a level1techs video on MaaS. Canonical has the ability to topple vSphere with oss in the next 10 to 20 years if they keep at it.
Ceph, kube, and the work to get this all working on windows and Linux guests is happening.
Yes, I agree with you 100%. So many companies chase the dollars and leave the lesser-funded home-market and academic-market behind. Like for me, I teach, and it is often very difficult to continually afford the hardware that is necessary to keep my skills up. So, companies (e.g., VMWare) should keep allowing the installation or creation of drivers for older hardware. Because many of my students can't hardly afford tuition, books, and time away from work to learn. Let alone -- all of the expensive hardware to do a home lab. So, they should always remember that, as they develop new products.
Thank you so much for this video! This kind of started a spark for wanting to make a home lab...
1:42 "a program called vSphere" - should say 'vCenter'. vSphere is the top-level product name. ESXi and vCenter are sub - components of vSphere
This video spot on, companies aren't going to pay big money for great features they won't use. To a reasonable extent I can do everything you described in the video with Winders Server Clustering, Hyper-V, and Storage Spaces Direct, with the cost included in the OS licensing. Other OS's have their own virtualization components as well. Companies are also using Azure and AWS so all of this backend is someone else's problem. VMware is going to end up an extreme niche like Oracle/Sun.
You could join a VMUG and get licenses for all of their software for $200/year to support your home lab. Could be a way to get the learning and training you're referring to Wendell :)
This is true! It's a decent option for homelabbers but still kinda misalign.
Yeah sure but honestly, 200$ is way to pricey at least for me as it's not a one time purchase
@@LampJustin it's pretty easy to find some % off coupon codes, but yes, it is an investment, free is definitely better
@@EdwardNewman considering that KVM is OpenSource and really really good with support for terraform, HA, vMotion, Storage Motion and vSAN (kinda at least) with Gluster or Cepth. For me it's more than just about the money, it's about the mindset as well.
@@LampJustin I'm definitely trying to embrace more open source myself, trying to influence my work in the same direction.
Good chat! I agree that a lot of recent stuff from VMware has made it more difficult for homelab stuff which is a shame... I had been really excited last summer to start trying some GPU pass through and gave up due to the Nvidia driver ... stuff... I figured that would be a good intro for myself into PCI passthrough in preparation for messing with Luna PCI HSMs for work but... nah, shame.
P.S. the screenshots of the old vsphere flash interface gave me flashbacks
This just adds to the reasons I'm movng my home lab stuff to proxmox but at the same time I still want to have a vmware esxi instance around to test on
I need to have a play with ProxMox and CEF. VMware admin for over 10 years. At least they got away from the licensing VM back in VMware 2.5 ;)
Good Video My homelab is a HP C7000 Blade server with a few 1.2TB IO Accelerator Fusion IO cards exactly like the picture at 1:58.
Nutanix: VMware is expensive? Hold my beer.
Amen, brother
@@Whipster-Old or Scale...
Career investment takes time and yes money. I view fanless small form factor equipment as a path with benefits as well as compromises. I never chose to go that route. My home lab began in a 2 bedroom apartment in 1994 and those options really weren't available at the time. By the time I got to working with GSX Server and ESX 2.0 in the early 2000s timeframe, I recognized the need for server class equipment in the home to cut my teeth on. I've really never looked back. Older off lease equipment available by the warehouse load, can be pieced together for a few hundred bucks here and there and it'll run vSphere at much more scale than the dense fanless options offer. Scale up or out is important considering the various infrastructure management appliances that must get piled on after - and they are getting more and more hungry in terms of memory and CPU requirements. My nearly 10 year old Dell PowerEdge R620 hardware is sill running vSphere 7 Update 2 today. Barely. The PERC controller and probably the CPUs are about to fall out of favor with ESXi and I'll look at a hardware refresh in the upcoming year. I won't hesitate to replace them with enterprise grade hardware - to run an enterprise SDDC.
Happy to keep chugging along with KVM for the homelab and every office I've worked at, if not RHEV on zfs.
That said, we're actually looking at moving to vSphere which could be an interesting migration week.
I totally do agree on your opinions!
I do run a NUC vSphere cluster at home. It contains 5 Intel NUC's with 32GB RAM each and I love it!
Through my University, I was able to get licenses for everything!
What I personally noticed for my homelab usage:
- The newer updates of version 7 don't natively support the NUC 8i5BEH anymore: They replaced the intel NIC driver through a version this model doesn't work with. It's really annoying having to patch the NUC's manually with each update! It broke around August 2020.
- I really hope there will be a way to add support for REALTEK NIC's again. Many people running a homelab are using a system they already had: and many of those have Realtek NIC's. Especially with SFF PC's, you can't just add a PCI E network card! Using USB NIC's is possible, but they don't support NFS storage. I had to add a Thunderbolt enclosure & Intel NIC to one of my nodes for being able to upgrade it to 7.0. Better driver support would make VMWare way more accessible! Especially with SFF computers.
- The fact I have to run vCenter isn't a problem to me. What is a problem to me: it isn't really stable on slower hardware (especially storage). It often fails during updates which creates a lot of problems. I know it isn't build for by usage so I can't really complain! I don't even complain about the RAM usage vSAN creates on my NUC's (16GB/32GB node are used for vSAN). It still annoys me.
All in all, I'm really happy with VMWare! It's a great product and I've learned a lot working with it in my homelab.
It's amazing having my "own cloud" at home!
I couldn't use VSphere 7.0 in my home lab because it no longer supports many home-lab relevant NICs (like many Realtek ones) - had to roll back to 6.7. It was a sad time.
Great video, however, there are points you are missing. The skills pipeline is actually VMUG, it costs $200 a year, but that's nothing when you are investing in your career. vRealize is that automation layer and with the options for Tanzu, they are shifting towards that stack. For the roll your own, govc works fantastic as a cli that is robust and accessible. Also, consider other infrastructure as code tools - like Terraform, packer and ansible as complete solutions for managing the entire infrastructure on VMware, as a platform. Just a few thoughts to add to the conversation. Keep up the good work!
I think you missed the entire point of the video. The Point is that the $200 VMUG is useless, unless you have $100.000 worth of hardware, just to install the software.
I'd love ESXi far more if they'd stop abandoning devices so frequently!
Thats my biggest gripe with them
VMware doesn't abandon devices, it is the OEM vendor's choice, unfortunately. The vendor certifies it.
You touch on some really good points with automation, and I do believe that VMware is thinking about that at some level. With their recent purchase of Saltstack and it being based on Python, which VMware is also invested in with the pyvmomi library, we should see better integration with automation when coupled with existing VMware ecosystem offerings like vRO.
I completely agree with your thoughts. I have been able to bypass the CPU gate on my old machines with documented attributes to do so and my newest additions to my personal lab are at the end of support (last supported version). They say you can get longer term, full licenses with VMUG membership at $200/year. I get this isn't necessarily any easier for home lab folks on a budget but does offer an alternative. It might be nice for VMware to sponsor or offer license "scholarships" to overcome what you cite. However with the ship sailing heavily towards containerization and supporting architectures this will change everything over the next five to ten years. And, love the FusionIO cards--they were the hot lick not so long ago.
Please please do review or video on liqid command center and liqid fabric switch. And always thank you for educating us.
I'm already in the process of moving my homelab from ESXi 6.7 to Proxmox as I saw the writing on the wall in recent versions (I've been using ESXi since it was called ESX)
I wasn't happy when I had to rollback to 6.7 for FusionIO support - but I did understood why I had to do so. At some point the legacy cruft has to be left behind. Their core audience exists in the Enterprise with VCPs that pretty much only run hardware within their support lifecycle.
Maybe if they released a community edition? But I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
Also keep in mind, VMware doesn't write those drivers, it is the OEM who does that, if they decide to "end of life" it, there's not much VMware can do.
Apart from a few Workstation Player installation to run several old machines, it's all XCP-NG + Xorchestra now. \good enough for my virtualisation requirements. I don't remember the last time I installed vSphere, but it was at lest six years ago.
10:22 - You can achieve this kind of cloud experience to your "end users" (mostly dev and other business units) with vSphere. Of course, you will pay a lot for all the requirements such as NSX, vSAN, and some vRealize products. The solution can also provide similar resources such as lambda functions (it's called something else) and other serverless features. And yes, It's getting very hard to test the new features. I'm also facing this kind of trouble trying to test Carbon Black and AVI Vantage.
But you might not be lucky with any NVME under VMware 7... As VMware went for Controller blacklisting in Vsphere 7
Got WD Black SN750s, Samsung 960 Pro, 960 Evo and 970 Evo Plus working...
The WDs are recognized as their datacenter counterpart SN720 and the 960s (both) as SM961/PM961 and 970 Evo as SM981/PM981/PM983...
But I had no luck with Intel SSD 750 (eventhough Intel is sharing platforms with the DC counterpart on that PCIe NVME) and a Crucial P1 (which even lead me to believe I had some weird lane sharing going on on a X99 with a 5960x)
Hey, what do you recommend for the cheapest and smallest vm server to replace a nuc?
VMware have been in the automation space for a very long time. Makes me laugh when the new drones bang on about native cloud. Hence their products "automation" and "orchestrator" kind of gives it away.
Could not agree more, and I actually found you through this video while searching for ProxMox resources in an attempt to migrate my home lab off of ESXi. I have some older Dell R710 servers currently running ESXi, but in an attempt to downside physically and power hunger-wise, I am attempting to move to NUCs as my hosts - I was able to get 64gb of RAM into some NUC7 and NUC8 boxes very cheaply, but with only 1gb networking, I was looking toward using a USB-C network adapter for additional networking capacity.. Is this something I would do in an enterprise? Of course not, but in a home lab, sure. Up 'till now, not being "supported" didn't mean it wasn't going to work - It just meant "dont expect us to fix it for you if it doesnt", and allowed home labs to flourish on second hand equipment.
The problem is, older/lower end 1gb NICs aren't supported in ESXi, and although I am used to installing linux drivers to get stuff to work in ESXi in that regard, I wasn't holding much hope for getting a USB NIC to work, so my search for alternate virtualization began. It seems like vSphere 7 is just going to make this situation worse, and they are going to generate a whole new generation of engineer who is more comfortable with whatever they have at home, which will NOT be ESXi anymore. I cant tell you how many customers I talked into VMWare designs over the years because I was confident enough to talk about it's capabilities based on tests I had completed in the basement. Now the answer is going to be "I'm not sure - they say it will work, but I've never seen it myself", and the customer is going to be a lot more hesitant to write the million dollar checks.
I guess this could just be a sign of the times. Large organizations have test labs and can afford the good stuff, and probably dont care, and actually I'm in that situation now, so my home lab is less relevant. I guess they are expecting that all the SMBs will end up going to azure or AWS anyway, so they dont care about them anymore. If that's true, then what they dont understand is that often, large enterprises are comprised of numerous small departments which have separate budgets and projects, but still could be HUGE customers once a technology is embraced and needs to be deployed enterprise wide. They are going to lose these customers because there's no way to allow the engineers to use the "real thing" anymore without huge investment. A good example I used to work for was Verizon. Many projects started out as small ideas tested locally by an individual department, and then once proven, got adopted as a real priority by the company, and got a real budget. VMWare will have a smaller foothold in these organizations if they only run on enterprise hardware.
Thanks for the video, and glad I found your channel. Time to go search through your ProxMox resources to help me decide if this is really the way I want to go for the future of my lab!
Where can I find a good read about the VMware legacy linux thing? Thanks
100% agree. I got into esxi because I could get a free license to setup a home lab. We recommend what we play with and feel comfortable with. Take away are way to play and we will find something else
I agree on the API/Training Pipeline. I hope that VMware does figure that bit out sooner than later.
I think their focus on k8s might be a path out. But in a more perfect world, vmware would develop a more dev-centric API outside of vCenter.
VMware needs to kill (or abstract) their darling vCenter in order to deliver equivalent value to AWS/GCP. I think they will eventually do that (maybe Openstack, or something home grown), but probably years out. Hopefully sooner if I have anything to say about it.
i wonder if ovirt, would fill in some kinda space for virtualization on the linux front
It used to be pretty clunky and terrible. Proxmox was much better when I tried oVirt.
That said, it looked like it was heading to be pretty good, and that was a few years back so maybe I should take another look.
So would that flash array work for a zil / slog or the newer ssd feature on FreeNAS? Also it is no mystery vmware, owned by EMC who also owns Dell, is removing legacy hardware.
The vSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is not managed by VMWARE. They leave it up to the hardware manufaturers to do the compatibility testing for each vSAN point upgrade. (yes, its INSANE) When hardware is not compatible, VMWARE has nothing to do with that. Its because the storage device manufacturer did not re-certify that product for VMWARE vSAN compatibility.
Speaking on hardware support as a whole not just vSAN, vmware manages and helps develop drivers. They've elected with version 7, to intentionally not include older VIBs which included linux drivers for certain hardware. Being owned by EMC / Dell, they have direct involvement with Dell hardware. If a PERC controller is no longer supported, that is a Dell/EMC/Vmware decision directly. It's not a stretch to associate this decision with encouraging customers to buy newer hardware.
Hey wendell, really love your videos and have been following for years, great to see more of this kind of content. Would you be willing to do a video on XCP-ng vs VMware vs Proxmox? What is your opinion on XCP-ng?
Vs oVirt :)
Hi Wendell,
I'm a developer working at VMware and I could try to pass down your feedback to my colleagues and see where this takes us.
Just one clarification - VMware is the company and the product is vSphere, vSAN is a separate product (although tightly integrated with the rest) and we have a huge set of products.
I just wanted to ask does blast extreme work with consumer GPUs or is that going to be a supported feature in the future, especially for people looking into home labbing for the first time.
A year later, I am curious if that feedback was well received, or just fell on deaf ears?
Vsan is a separate tech then Esxi. It's to enable hyperconverged infrastructure. This requires multiple nodes and therefore orchestration layers. It's not like brtfs. It's more like ceph and gluster from a storage perspective, mixed with the components to actually manage it from storage to use case with VMware Esxi. However none of this prevents you from simply using external shared storage like you have done in the past. Or creating a massive ceph storage solution and pointing Esxi hosts to it. Nothing has been removed.
Fyi, you can test vsan with v7 just fine. You just might not be able to with those iodrives as they are dropping support for this old hardware. But you can do it with different hardware. The problem is that nobody really is bothering to test it anyway because testing these solutions already requires so much hardware for most people that it's not reasonable to begin with.
If if doesn't seem like doing this kind of stuff is fun, then you should probably take a long hard look at your reason for evening being in this part of the industry. These are largely passion projects and people that don't have the passion and drive to build a serious learning platform for themselves to learn these skills and more should find something else (related or otherwise) that *does* inspire them. Ben Franklin once said, “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the highest return.”
Wendell - I love your content and appreciate the passion - from one passionate nerd to another - you da man! :)
Other Henry Ford quotes:
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."
"You can have any color Ford that you want, as long as it's black." :)
Your point is well made. My home lab (w/ vSAN) is capped at 6.7 U3 because as of today there isn't a way slipstream the NIC drivers for my set up in 7.x. That is a shame.
However, one thing you didn't mention is that VMware provides free training in the form of Hands On Labs. These are fully functioning vSphere LABs that anyone can access once you create an account. You can choose to follow the LAB guide or you can ignore it completely and break everything and try to fix it again.
There are limitations with HoL. Your configuration doesn't persist once you are done so you would have to start from scratch each time you visit. It can be slow. But it is free and you always have access to the most modern version of the VMware portfolio.
I spent a lot of money on my LAB equipment. But that was over 5 years ago. I would love to keep it updated with the most current version but in IT 5 years is an eternity and I have received full value from my hardware. And it's not like I have to throw it away. All of my host servers will find a life in other roles. It just wont be VMware. For VMware, I will just save the money and use Hands on Labs going forward.
Looking forward to those flash devices turning up in larger numbers on the discarded market then! Personally I think this obsession with discarding older hardware support has more to do with OEM sales integration (and perhaps trying to scare enterprise customers onto cloud services) but I think that is going to be a mistake; SAP made the same overly aggressive moves and their uptake wasn't anywhere near what they make it out to be for some of their enterprise products.
Understanding risk aversion is something they need to be paying more attention to.
EsXi is always been damn stable. But they are making some stupid mistakes pissing more and more sysadmin.
@Wendell
Is ESXi still the thingy with the least overhead compared to other solutions? By just judging the performance without looking at any “corporate decisions”?
vSphere is exceptionally good at maximizing compute and memory /storage
Well that's great.. kinda wanted to build a home vmware 7 lab to sharpen my skills for work.
Hard to learn the product your customer uses when can't use it as easily.
hi is there a way to use those drives in a desktop?
I love the sweatshirt, would love to get it as a t-shirt
I have the same radiator in my house. Painted white though. Gorgeous. Haha
I see both sides... at work, I like vS 7 - it has a lot of nice features - especially for standard deployment (MSP, lots of the same kind of Servers)
on the other Side, I run Consumer-Hardware at home, due to Power Efficiency (my three Hypervisors, NAS and Switches with PoE WiFi only zipping on 2.8Amp @230V average)
where I had to jump thru enough hoops to make it work on 6.7... and already, one of my Hypervisors is a Proxmox machine - but tbh, I really miss a lot of functionality from VMware...
Does Freenas support those drives? If so, while not as elegant maybe, load up a Freenas server VM and pass this drive through via VMDirectPath, then use iSCSI sharing from Freenas. Not as easy maybe, but to your point of using these drives and installing drivers to help educate yourself on things, I believe this would help in the same way and you can still use your drives.
VMWare is an amazing tool that I've personally relied on since college, however.. these days a free license is limited to 8 cores per VPS, which just makes it screwy.
Likely I'll just run standalone CentOS on my machines in the future, and find an alternative way of recording usages onto my exchange server.
Might be a stupid question but: do those Fusion IO drives work with HyperV?
As long as you host it on Linux, which is probably the better option at that point if you want niche hardware.
Hmm ... I just use VMware Workstation and nested virtualization to run my ESXi on any hardware that runs a regular OS - it actually works quite well and you don't need any special drivers... and you can run multiple ESXi hosts on a single hardware to do VSAN and stuff...
I just built a vmware esxi 7-machine for my homelab with chinese x99-motherboard, xeon 2678v3, 128GB RAM, nvme-drive and supported NIC. Working great.
Can you recommend me a general Nic supported for vmware 7
Intel x550 ?
@@Level1Techs I have a Dell Alienware Area 51 R3 for my homelab and I currently have installed Esxi 6.7 with a Realtek NIC (modified installer) but I need to update to Esxi7 then I follow your recommendation, I even see a version X550 T2, I assume it will be compatible, thanks a lot, I hope it works
vCenter is what he means. vSphere is the product family that vCenter and ESXi live under
Yeah, I think they get bored every few years and rename all their services. VMware Vue / Horizon.
Any useful thing you could do on AWS free tier (always free) ?
11:50 could someone elaborate on how Azure's services are not quite lined up with what VMware products offer?
He's not comparing the products directly - you can't compare Azure to vSphere except in certain constraints. Wendell is referring to API driven provisioning, which is generally more mature in Azure. That's pretty much Azure's purpose, where VMware fundamentally still expects a team of admins and engineers to provision VMs at some level.
Based upon recent experiences with VMWare's enterprise sales team I can say that, at least from my perspective, VMWare BARELY cares about large enterprise customers. They are so convinced about their own awesomeness, they don't even bother to ask whether the features they're presenting are ones that are off value to the customer. Given that, it's unlikely that they have much concern about the engineers trying to setup their products in home labs.
Reminds me of Novell. At some point I think the only game in town outside of Unix for network storage. They were so anal about licensing. One manual book would be $500 around 1995. At the time Microsoft with a much worse Windows NT would let people use the thing practically free. Anybody remembers Novell anymore ?
Exactly!
If people can't setup hardware and labs using VMWare then they'll be less likely to want to learn it... meanwhile AWS is trying to take over as we speak. It's going to be difficult to choose VMWare over AWS when the number of AWS certified professionals surpass VMWare, regardless of scenarios where VMWare solutions would be better suited.
As someone who is using Azure a _lot_ .. what are you missing from Azure?
It is sad to see so much gone, but because of this I learned how to inject deprecated drivers in newer versions of ESXi
As a Cloud Support Engineer for a colo/MSP company, I can say that the features added to vSphere 7 have almost no demand among our customers. We have 1 customer who MIGHT have an interest, but only because they're already doing them on Linux VMs in a VMWare environment.
I like that you're talking about skills pipelines. That's the easiest sub ever (got here from Ian's collaborative stream)
what do you mean by VMware 7?
ESXi in version 7 or vSphere in version 7?
I enjoy playing around with my Homelab as and when I am allowed ( the Wife :-) and I used to enjoy VMWARE but now I spend more time on HyperV as it is cheap comes with the OS. the only thing I don't like is that you loss some of the resources with Windows as you need the OS before you can install HyperV were as VMWARE all you need is a very like EXI installation.
You can use the Hyper V server , basically windows core with hyper v for free, just be sure to hook it up to a domain. Hyper v is a type one HV the same as VMWARE and loads before Windows when you enable the role.
I would like to see what you would think of xcp-ng as well as they say they are the biggest competition to VMware
I think the argument to support the types of hardware run in home labs is valid. VmWare could get around liability, but throwing disclaimers in the EULA about not supporting certain types of hardware for production use.
That said, there are absolutely ways for engineers to use all of the functionality cheaply in a lab setup. It's called VMUG Advantage. It's an annual membership (I think it's 200/yr, but there are a number of discount codes out there that lower this to 180.00). It's sanctioned by vmware and gives you essentially development licenses to everything.
As far as I understand, VMware didn't just remove a lot of drivers of old Hardware, but also the vmkLinux Driver API?
VMWARE relies on 3rd party storage vendors to maintain their vSAN HCL. Huge blunder that has regularly cost vSAN customers tens of thousands in needless rip and replace as vendor testing fades. How many storage vendors will continue to consistently re-test compatibility for every vSAN point update? Not Samsung and not Intel, I can tell you from personal experience. The approved drives you buy today WILL NOT be on the vSAN HCL tomorrow. Were moving on.
also: vmware is working on containerization but restricts the use to their enterprise/premium products. from my point of view this is most interesting for small/medium sized companies as the big players already have their devops teams with a full kubernetes infrastructure etc.
Very insightful video actually. Thank you!
VMware does provide large amounts of software through the VMUG Advantage program. For $200 per year you get ESXi (6 and 7), vSphere (6 and 7), NSX-T, VMware workstation 16, Tanzu, vRealize Operations, Horizon (Advanced Edition), vRealize Suite, Vmware Cloud Foundation, Fusion 12, vRNI, vSAN 7 and vCloud Director all thrown in. It's not free but at 55 cents per day, it is a bargain for homelabbers. Oh and ESXi for ARM is free.
Where can I get that sweater/shirt?
I got my t-shirt version some 15+ years ago from ThinkGeek.
BTW, ever heard of Google? :-P
I think VMWare's answer to this is their online lab. I took the VMUG path and paid for the 3 year membership, tried to get my employer to kick in. I hope when C-Virus goes away to go to VMware local meetings.
Wondering if you could do a Xen Server, Citrix video.. yes, they're still around 😉👍
I'm beginning to thing Wendell has been raiding my closet, except that's a hoodie, mine's a long sleeved tee.
There's been more than one video where I felt like one of us should go change because we're wearing the same outfit.
But then I thought, he too is a man of culture.
We are using vRealize for infrastructure automation for our private cloud. I am sure if that is something you are talking about that you are missing from vmware or not.
Nutanix has a user self service portal where they can deploy VM’s and orchestrate whatever they want within their quotas (ex Give your dev team 20tb storage, 48 cpu votes, and 256gb ram, and they can do whatever they want within those limits) works super well, and VM’s spin up even faster than azure or AWS deployments. Scripting is supported as well, as well as automation. Not to mention it’s included on the hyper visor that’s included for free with their hardware? Unlike VXrail where you still have to buy VSAN licenses.
Have you had a chance to play with nutanix yet?
Thanks for the video, I'd like know your opinion, is vmware better than proxmox?
Better? Yes. But what are you planning to do? Proxmox may be "good enough"
@@Level1Techs thanks, I need a cluster with two servers in High Availability and the equivalent to vmware vmotion function in proxmox
I agree with Wendell, the skills you gain from running a home lab are what our industry is built on. It's a damn shame that vmware is doing this.
So to play devil's advocate, vmware want to maintain their positive reputation in the enterprise market. Old hardware (generally) is more likely to fail, and in an enterprise setting, a low level sys admin might be tempted to run some heavily used hardware in on-premise hosts to patchwork something in to working at a low cost, meaning it might not be as reliable. Decision makers are likely to know the vmware brand from it being a big cost in the IT budget, so if it goes wrong somehow and there's downtime for end-users, fingers will be pointed first at the sys admin, and then they'll most likely blame it on 'a glitch with vmware' - a believable half-truth. One which decreases the likelihood (very slightly) of the decision makers sticking with vmware when it comes up for renewal. Multiply that liklihood across the whole market share which vmware occupies, and you can see how much future revenue they're probably securing to in the near to mid term with this strategy.
However, where they've gone wrong, as Wendell alludes to, is the long term consequences of slightly less people being skilled up in their software than before - the cost of running a home lab will become prohibitive for some due to this decision they've made.
Personally, it doesn't affect me that much, but the home lab skills element is very relevant, especially with WfH.
My advice: If you want to stop them, vote with your wallets.
Plenty of other vm solutions to lab with. If vmware skills/lab instance are a must a company can approve the expense for the licensing.
My training stopped at 6.7. I'm already looking to educate myself on other platforms.
Learn cloud. Virtualization doesn’t pay well anymore
@@bthegawd8113 Cloud is just a virtualisation enviornment that is located somewhere else... Or if you are hosting with OVH in Strasbourg (SB2) in cindered harddrives...
@@itmkoeln I know that but being a cloud infra engineer is more lucrative than legacy on prem jobs.
@asdrubale bisanzio
You're missing the point.... "Cloud" will fool HR people and senior managers. "Virtualisation" is old to those non-IT people.
@asdrubale bisanzio Yup and we make way more $$$ doing so. I look back at my vmware days and shutter.
Hyper-V Core 2019 with Storage Spaces offers some interesting Software Defined Storage options.
It's so much easier to get ahold of VMware ESXi/Vshpere than Citrix Xen Server with latest builds for learning in a home lab.
can you fix my pc, i want to run esx but it says its too old