ESXi

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  • 1.  Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 06, 2021 05:04 PM

    Hi, I currently run a home server (ESX 5) on an old desktop PC but I calculate this is now costing £120+ (I reckon its about 80w) in power per year and I cant justify it. I want something with really low power consumption and having retired, no longer have any company affiliation to help with getting licences. I am happy to continue to run my ESXi 5 licence but will modern hardware be compatible?

    Will one of these fanless micro PC's work or require drivers which don't exist?

    Can I get a free licence for a later version and will this require running vCenter (I am currently using the vSphere client)?

    Appreciate any help

    Wallport



  • 2.  RE: Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 07, 2021 12:51 PM

    Check out reddit /homelab 



  • 3.  RE: Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 09, 2021 07:46 AM

    Hey ,

    Take a look to the IntelNUC ones, maybe they fit your power consumption requirements, there are bunch of models and series.



  • 4.  RE: Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 09, 2021 09:24 AM

    Hello,

    i use three intel nucs as a 2 node vsan cluster.

    One of them is the management esxi for DNS, vCenter and Witness, the another one for the 2 node vSAN Cluster. 

    However you should be careful, some intel nucs has only one hard disk. That's why I have to leave the case open

    But you can use 1 or more intel nucs with a qnap as shared storage.


    Krech_0-1639041722111.jpeg

     



  • 5.  RE: Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 09, 2021 09:27 AM

    Download link for vSphere Hypervisor 7 (ESXi 7): https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi7

     

     



  • 6.  RE: Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

    Posted Dec 29, 2021 04:51 PM

    Thanks Scott/all. Am now running an ASRock Beebox-S bought on ebay for £100 with ESXi 7.2. Its stable except for the USB NIC I added which drops out every couple of days. Got some questions out about this and may need to buy one with a different chipset.

    ...and this server idles at 10w running my firewall VM!