My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

Home Lab
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Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

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How to enable SSH auto login on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X

Home Lab
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edgerouter ssh key auto login

SSH key authentication not only provides a more convenient way to logging into your EdgeRouter X, but is also more secure because the private key replaces the need of a password and thus is typically more difficult to brute force.

The below steps will show how to generate a SSH key, add it to the router, and then disable password authentication so that only the key-pair can be used to login.

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How to perform Instant File Recovery using NAKIVO Backup

Home Lab
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NAKIVO Backup has been a great addition in my home lab and just a few months ago I wrote about my first impressions of NAKIVO Backup. Now I have a few posts lined up to highlight some individual features of NAKIVO Backup, starting with Instant File Recovery.

If you haven’t already guessed it, Instant File Recovery allows you to recover files or folders directly from a previous backup job. This is a great alternative to performing a full restore of a VM when all you might need is a single or even a couple of files and/or folders.

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Use Pi-Hole to block ads on all devices in your network

Home Lab
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Sure ad blockers have been around for a long while now, but those are typically only available for your web browsers and not ever device allows you to install them such as cell phones, media players, smart TV’s, etc. I came across a neat project that allows you to block web ads on every device in your network, called Pi-Hole.

In a nutshell Pi-Hole was developed to run on a Raspberry Pi, but will run on most any Debian based distro, and will act as a DNS server to which you point your devices or router to use as the DNS server so that all requests are filtered through Pi-Hole. Pi-Hole then blocks 100’s of thousands ad domains. All without having to use a single browser extension and for FREE!

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How to install Ubiquiti UniFi controller on the cloud

Home Lab
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Recently I replaced my wireless router, an Asus RT-AC66U, with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X router and Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR access point. Both of which are a HUGE step up over traditional consumer wireless routers.

The Ubiquiti access points use software called the Ubiquiti UniFi controller to configure and control the access points which can be installed locally or in the cloud – allowing you to manage the access points no matter where they are located.

To automate the install process, I created a simple script to deploy the Ubiquiti UniFi Controller in the cloud on a Ubuntu server, and have also tested the script on three popular VPS providers: Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean – all three worked perfectly!

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Intel NUC i5 5th Generation an ESXi lab improvement

Home Lab
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Intel NUC BLKNUC5I5MYHE 5th gen

For the past year and a half I’ve been using the Intel i5 3rd Gen NUC’s in my ESXi home lab with great success. In this time several people have asked if I recommend anything newer, and while Intel had a few 4th gen models I wasn’t really sold on them as most CPU benchmarks put them the same as my 3rd gen or lower and only added support for a 2.5″ drive which at the time I didn’t need but then Intel released news about several Intel NUC 5th generation models!

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VMware ESXi 5 fails to install on Intel NUC, “No Network Adapters” error

Home Lab
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If you use the VMware ESXi 5 ISO image and try to install it on an Intel NUC you’ll receive the following error during the install.

No Network Adapters

No network adapters were detected. Either no network adapters are physically connected to the system, or a suitable driver could not be located. A third party driver my be required.

Ensure that there is at least one network adapter physically connected to the system before attempting installation. If the problem persists, consult the VMware Knowledge Base.

The “No Network Adapters” on the Intel NUC error message during the ESXi install is because VMware removed a number of drivers (non-enterprise drivers) from their ESXi 5.x image and in order to use the Intel NUC as an ESXi host you need to create a customized ESXi image with the NIC drivers added to the image.

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Install Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in for VMware

Home Lab
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Synology

In the recent DSM update (5.1), Synology added VMware VAAI support for NFS volumes using two primitives which are Full File Clone and Reserve Space. What do these VAAI primitives offer?

  • Full File Clone enables virtual disks to be cloned by the NAS albeit while the machine is powered off.
  • Reserve Space allows you can create a thick VMDK file. However Reserve Space does not off-load the work to the array. The benefit of thick VMDKs is that many use eager-zero for high I/O performance needs.

On the Synology side of things you just need to update to DSM 5.1, but in order to take advantage of VAAI you still need to install the VIB plugin on your ESXi 5.5 hosts.

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Crucial 16GB memory, perfect for Intel NUC

Home Lab
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crucial 16gb 204pin memory

I’m a huge fan the of Intel NUC‘s for a VMware home lab. In fact I just recently picked up my third Intel NUC to give me more head room for a small VMware Horizon (View) environment at home.

I typically use G.Skill memory in my NUC’s as I’ve had great luck with the brand in my desktop and laptop for years. However G.Skill has been increasing in price which made me look around for alternatives and came across Crucial DDR3 204-pin memory for less money, but days after I purchased it they too went up in price. However they are now back on sale and cost about $50 less then the G.Skill memory I have been using in my first two NUC’s.

I’ve been using the Crucial memory now for the last several months without any problems and even though they are rated at a lower voltage I can’t say I really see any difference in power savings or consumption compared to the G.Skill 1.5V. If you’re looking to upgrade now might be a good time to take advantage of the sale price.