New Home Lab

The best part of being a vExpert for VMWare is the community. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a question or was just interested in doing something where someone has done it first (and usually better) than I have. The members are truly valuable and (yes, us geeks can be sarcastic and snarky at times) always are willing to help out.

Another great benefit is the leadership! I can’t say enough about Corey and the team and what value they bring to our community. They introduce us to new technologies, bring us into vExpert sessions lead by leading vendors and get us access to licenses that we can POC things (as well as run a home lab) to gain experience. A bit thanks to them!

Last year, one of the benefits was (in partnership with the VMWare Community & Advocacy Team, NetApp and Cohesity recieving a Maxtang Mini PC as a gift (BYO RAM & HDD). I was pretty happy with my current Gigabyte/NVidia NUC, but it didn’t support 7+, so I decided to try my luck on the Maxtang.

Unfortunately, the Realtek NIC was not supported, so I ordered a 32GB stick of DDR4 RAM from Amazon, a 1TB M.2 SATA III drive, 1GB USB NIC, and (just in case, and recommendation from the community) an external USB fan.

All in all, about $180 and I was up and running with the potential to upgrade the RAM at a later time.

In order to install VMWare, you need to have a valid management NIC, and unfortunately the drivers for the USB NIC are not included in the install ISO from VMWare. Luckily, the community has developed a ‘fling‘ that supports USB network cards, thus we have to create a custom ISO of ESXi and inject the drivers into the image. Florian Grehl from Virten.net goes through how to install the fling and make a custom ISO in this article on the website, so I don’t have to go through that here.

Once I got the ISO written to a USB, the installation was somewhat painless. I did have to disable TPM in the BIOS as I was getting an error.

I was able to install ESXi 8 and run a few VM’s without issues. The plan is to install some Kubernetes and possibly NSX-T, but I’ll see how far I get. Thanks again to the vExpert program and all those that support it!