ESXi alternatives for home lab - looking for some suggestions

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thecoffeeguy

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greetings my friends.

As the title states, I am exploring other options outside of ESXi to meet some of my requirements. A little background info first:

Been running ESXi in my home lab for almost 2 years now. Works fine. Biggest complaint is lack of a web interface which is one major reason that I am looking at alternatives.

My home virtual lab is 100% for work. I do a lot of testing of stuff within my VM's. Flexibility, options are all key things i need in my lab.

As my lab continues to grow my need for more running VM's, more networking options is growing. That said, I am looking to add the following to my home lab:

-more bare metal physical nodes that i can cluster together.
-the ability to vmotion VM's around.
-the ability to vstorage as well would be nice, but not a requirement.
-web interface is critical for me.

Like I said before, whats important to me is what goes on within those VM's. Lots of testing, debugging as well as network test (how stuff reacts across different networks, vlans, DMZ's etc.)

That is where ESXi is falling short and need some suggestions.

I have been doing a lot of research lately on this and have read up on the following and am hoping to get some suggestions/recommendations:

-openstack
-Xen
-Linux KVM
-virtmanager/ovirt
-proxmox

I should mention, I am very much a command line junkie. A lot of my VM's i do testing in are running Linux and Solaris (solaris zones as well) so I am not afraid of the CLI.

I am also going to add some type of NAS to my lab to serve up storage to my nodes as well as act as a backup (plus, I want to test out CEPH...sounds super awesome).

So thats my situation here.

Based on my requirements and what I listed above, any suggsetions or recommendations?
Any other items I should consider that I may have missed?

Really appreciate the help here.
Looking forward to your replies.

Cheers,

TCG
 
Assuming you're willing to invest in yourself... IMO, ESXi is just the way to go. The only shortcomings you should run into on the free version are the lack of web interface and clustering/vmotion abilities. However, if you get the VMUG package, you gain all of that for super cheap.
Can you elaborate a lot more on what you're requirements are and what you're trying to do? How exactly is your current setup falling short? What hardware are you running now, and what hardware are you getting?

You state you "need" vmotion, storage vmotion (I assume this is what you mean by "vstorage")... but then you say that what is going on in the guests is more important than the host. If you just need a beefy system to run all the guests, and are using vmotion to overcome your lack of such a system... it'd probably be better to just get a much bigger host and not worry about the hypervisor level at all.
 
Eulogy said:
Assuming you're willing to invest in yourself... IMO, ESXi is just the way to go. The only shortcomings you should run into on the free version are the lack of web interface and clustering/vmotion abilities. However, if you get the VMUG package, you gain all of that for super cheap.
Can you elaborate a lot more on what you're requirements are and what you're trying to do? How exactly is your current setup falling short? What hardware are you running now, and what hardware are you getting?

You state you "need" vmotion, storage vmotion (I assume this is what you mean by "vstorage")... but then you say that what is going on in the guests is more important than the host. If you just need a beefy system to run all the guests, and are using vmotion to overcome your lack of such a system... it'd probably be better to just get a much bigger host and not worry about the hypervisor level at all.
Click to expand...

Hey Eulogy. Thanks for the reply.
I have no problem investing in myself. To me, it is totally worth it.

Right, the biggest shortcomings is the lack of a web interface. This is because I work off a Mac, Linux and PC machines. When I travel, I VPN back into my home network and have to fire up a PC VM to launch vsphere. I really want to get away with that and just fire up a browser. A lot easier.

bascially, I run a shuttle setup with a i7 single socket and 32gigs of memory. I can get about 8-10 VM's running before I start to see things slow down. I would like to increase that and have more VM's running. I went the shuttle route because it was a small form factor and fit nicely into my office. Space is definitely something I need to think about moving forward.
Hardware moving forward, was looking at a some of those HP Microservers, but I have not settled on anything at this point.

I probably mistyped. I dont need vmotion or vstorage. those would be nice to have (and its just cool to be able to do it). It just provides a bit of flexibility and options to distribute the load across my nodes if i am unable to go with a "bigger" box (bigger as in dimensions).

Networking is really key. I need to be able to setup multiple virtual networks, VLAN's etc. for my lab environment.

Lastly, backups are going to be critical. Something I a working into the mix. I am debating right now if i want to build out a FreeNAS box right now, or go with a QNAP for ease and form factor.


I am not familiar with the VMUG package, but i can look into that.

Hopefully that adds some more to help shape what i am looking for.

Thanks again!

TCG
 
VMUG is totally worth it, IMO. $200/yr and you get licenses for vsphere, vcenter server, etc... I shelled out for this for my lab setup, and it was the best $200 I ever spent. I shelled out a bit more for veeam to back things up too...
 
IMHO if it is for work, use what work would use. There is no sense in having a lab with proxmox when ESXi is what is used at work. Different applications work differently on different hypervisors.

VMUG is the way to go, and you may be able to get work to pay for it if you are not paid hourly. You can claim it is for "educational purposes" furthering your knowledge and certifications.

Using vsphere would enable clustering, ha and all the cool features that you need if you want multiple hosts.
 
MrGuvernment said:
could just set up a VPN to your network and use vsphere client over the vpn?
Click to expand...

I definitely could and do right now. I really want to use a web browser as i VPN 95% of the time from my Macbook Pro.

bds1904 said:
IMHO if it is for work, use what work would use. There is no sense in having a lab with proxmox when ESXi is what is used at work. Different applications work differently on different hypervisors.

VMUG is the way to go, and you may be able to get work to pay for it if you are not paid hourly. You can claim it is for "educational purposes" furthering your knowledge and certifications.

Using vsphere would enable clustering, ha and all the cool features that you need if you want multiple hosts.
Click to expand...

I will look into VMUG. Does it provide the web interface by chance?
I am totally cool with sticking with ESXi if it can do what i want.

the only other two items i really have looked into is:

-Linux KVM with ovrit
and
-OpenStack

Work is pretty flexible in letting me setup my environment as long as its reasonable. :)
 
thecoffeeguy said:
I definitely could and do right now. I really want to use a web browser as i VPN 95% of the time from my Macbook Pro.



I will look into VMUG. Does it provide the web interface by chance?
I am totally cool with sticking with ESXi if it can do what i want.
Click to expand...

VMUG provides a 1 year licence to Vsphere vcenter (which is the full management suite, web interface included) along with all the other enterprise goodies.
 
bds1904 said:
VMUG provides a 1 year licence to Vsphere vcenter (which is the full management suite, web interface included) along with all the other enterprise goodies.
Click to expand...

Thats awesome. Im purchasing that right now. $200/year..... :eek: easily worth it.
 
Ruffy said:
head up, when its time to renew you get a 15% discount.
Click to expand...

Even better.

On a quick side note here, what do folks use for backup? I have never tried the free VEAM solution, but as my lab grows, it may be an option. Can you install that on a VM on the ESXi box, or better to make it a physical machine?

Thx folks.

TCG
 
VDP if u got it with that bundle... It is Avamar backend Code but the De-Dup on it works pretty darn well...
 
as long as your storage is fast enough that it doesn't implode. Get Veeam instead.
 
thecoffeeguy said:
the only other two items i really have looked into is:

-Linux KVM with ovrit
and
-OpenStack

Work is pretty flexible in letting me setup my environment as long as its reasonable. :)
Click to expand...

Primarily a KVM user here. For home use you can really use whatever you want. The hypervisors regardless of who makes one have performance shockingly close to that of baremetal hosts. The vendor value primarily lies within the tools and VMWare and Xen are pretty damn well up there. But that doesn't mean they are necessary, and much less for home use. Clustering/HA isn't unique to them. It really comes down to three things for home use:

  • Required Ease of Use
  • Educational Purposes / Work-related reasons
  • Budget

I would evaluate based on that for home use.

As for backup I use ZFS (for backup and as the file system for the VM's) and it does anything I need it to.
 
Last edited:
I have iSCSI for storage served up from a ZFS SAN. Main reason being: I am getting about 50% compression (lz4) on all the VMs, so this cuts my storage usage in half (and speeds up disk I/O).
 
I used ESXi for couple of years but decided to switch to KVM+libvirt. Everything just works and it performs much better than ESXi (gotta love virtio <3). If you want to cluster multiple nodes i'd suggest you take a look at Opennebula instead of OpenStack. OpenStack is nice when you start to have multiple racks or servers or even multiple datacenters. It's very bloated for home use.
 
With the latest version of the free Veeam, you can use powershell to automate your backups.
Manual backups never get done.
 
I never knew that VMUG offered licenses... and here I've been wasting time figuring out how to cron manual shortcuts for the free ESXI...

That being said, I was thinking...
ESXi 5.5 does have a limited web client you could use...
and if you like CLI, you could just manage everything from the ESXi CLI and skip the gui?
But then I realized I couldn't remember what the free version supported...

and when you said Web interface the new QNAP Virtual station VMhost came to mind because it's something I just started researching.

Openstack is too hardware needy for home use unless you have more hardware to throw at it.
 
Modus said:
I didn't either, I have XenServer running my hosts. It maybe some what of a chore now to backup/export my guests so I can rebuild the hosts with vmware:eek:
Click to expand...

Xenserer has a very large/powerful CLI. Should be able to automate this in a shell script pretty easily.

Explore the xe toolset.
 
Robstar said:
Xenserer has a very large/powerful CLI. Should be able to automate this in a shell script pretty easily.

Explore the xe toolset.
Click to expand...

I know the xe toolset pretty well at this point (running it 3yrs now) but to the other posters point it's not VMware. I think most would agree that if they could run ESXi at home they would, I run Xen because it's free but it does have quite a few pain points. I'm going to join the club and go the VMUG route:cool:
 
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