Technology

     While working on some projects in my home lab recently, I’ve begun encountering resource shortages. Many of these shortages stem from my original intention to utilize repurposed desktop hardware. Although my lab no longer uses VMware, I still utilize it for work and read content, such as William Lam’s blog . While browsing his VCF9 content, I began to notice some relatively inexpensive machines that would meet my needs by providing more CPU and RAM for my workloads. The Minisforum MS-A2 immediately came to consideration due to its 16-core/32-thread AMD processor and the ability to support up to 96GB of RAM. However, shipping is relatively delayed, and I don’t need the smallest form factor available. Further research led me to the Minisforum 795S7 , which has similar specifications but in a larger case.     The 795S7 fits exactly what I was looking for in a lab machine. The processor and RAM mentioned above enable me to reduce the required number of hosts f...

  With Broadcom's recent licensing changes for VMware, I decided to change the hypervisor for my home lab. After evaluating several freely available options likely to work in an enterprise environment, I chose the XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra solution. When reviewing XCP-ng as a solution, it appears to be the closest to running VMware while maintaining an open-source foundation. The stack consists of two main components: XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra. XCP-ng is the equivalent of ESXi and is directly installed on the hardware. With the recent release of 8.3, XOA-Lite is now part of the stack, allowing for a GUI experience on the host without requiring an external controller. Xen Orchestra is a vCenter-like control plane that centralizes control. Unlike vCenter, it is installed on another machine, and hosts can be controlled by multiple XO instances. For day-to-day operations, it runs on an Ubuntu server VM, though I have an instance installed through my main laptop's WSL instance. Overall, t...