Anyone ever play around with VMware’s ESXi?
I’d love to mess with it, but I don’t seem to have the hardware it cares to be associated with. It’s a spoiled brat. lol
It has its own propietary microkernel, and there is a court case ongoing with GPL alleging that they borrowed parts of the Linux kernel.
BSD got bogged down in that sort of thing.
It reminds me of one of those foofoo cats with the long hair that refuses to eat anything except $100 cans of cat food made by michelin starred chefs. lol
Done a bit with it myself… It’s doesn’t play well with AMD CPU, much more streamlined with Intel…
The “O/S” itself is called Photon OS…
I used to run it on a pair of identical Lenovo PC’s with a piddling 16 GB RAM each - boot off CF cards (compact flash) - most big VMware shops, have blades that boot off SD-Cards - VM vmdk files stored on my FreeNAS (using NFS, I did get iSCSI working, but it didn’t seem any better or faster than NFS, and more restrictive, but iSCSI kinda feels like you’ve got a SAN [and I kinda hate SANs!]).
I never did get vSphere or vCenter working, 'cause that required yet another 16 GB RAM machine (I know many people do it by running it as an ESX VM itself - but given both my ESXi machines only had 16 GB RAM - pointless) and it also required DNS, couldn’t hack it to use /etc/hosts and it certainly didn’t work with avahi name resolution… Anyway - I was able to “pretend” fault tolerance by using the ESXi web UI to boot a VM on another ESXi host (but not “vmotion” - i.e. VM stays up while it’s trucked off to another hypervisor).
And there the exercise ended… Didn’t see the point…
Have “toyed” with the idea of buying a couple of smaller NUC style PCs (with Intel CPU) but more RAM (64 GB minimum) - but other competing priorities have kyboshed those plans… I could use my mostly unused Gigabyte Brix I guess, to run vCenter, I think it can run as an appliance on PhotonOS, or, install it on any Linux machine (probably a Red Hat / RPM based one), and maybe get bind working on it?
Or maybe setup a Windows server VM in ESX, and setup DNS server services on it (hate to admit it - but - I kinda prefer how Windows does DNS, to handcrafting bind databases - it’s HORRIBLE!).
Even with that ceiling of 16 GB on each hypervisor, it was enough to run a bunch of different server VMs with Linux OS on them…
If I was making the decision - I’d recommend ProxMox anyday over VMware ESX / vSphere / vCenter! (I’ve also tried ProxMox on those same Lenovo PCs)…
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At least Promox is FOSS
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you sir have good taste in hypervisors LOL
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