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The ultimate NUC for a vSphere lab is the "hades canyon" NUC8i7HVK. I have three of them in a vSAN cluster. * dual NVME drives for all NVME vSAN * dual nics w
by moondev 7y ago
The ultimate NUC for a vSphere lab is the "hades canyon" NUC8i7HVK. I have three of them in a vSAN cluster.
* dual NVME drives for all NVME vSAN
* dual nics work out of the box for ESXi
* dual thunderbolt 3 ports to enable 10GbE via TB3 adaptor or PCIe expansion
* Linux friendly AMD GPU that has no problems being passed through to a nix or win vm
* low profile and easily stackable for a rack shelf
* Supports 2x32GB SODIMMs
* Power efficient
* Low noise
Love these things!
- mtsr 7y agoAren’t vSphere licenses a bit expensive for the average homelab? I personally went with a larger former workstation with more cores and RAM, because I expect to only ever have a single node, even if I’d love to have a full cluster.
- InvaderFizz 7y agoVMUG Advantage membership ($200/year) gets you a 6 socket, non-production license for basically the entire VMWare catalog.
- yakk0 7y agojust the ESXi hypervisor is free for non-production use.
- ex3ndr 7y agoI found recently that they got 500 bucks license for 6 CPUs now! I think it is doable since it is lifetime license (without updates though after a year(?)).
- auggierose 7y agoMe too, they are so tiny and powerful! Just got the 64GB Frost Canyon one, awesome little thing. Running it with an Nvidia 2080Ti via Razor Core Chroma and Ubuntu 20.04. GPU Compute (CUDA) works, which is really the only thing I need it for, but I cannot get it properly working with a display though.
- tpolzer 7y agoIf you just want network between them, you should actually be able to connect them directly with a thunderbolt cable, no need for Ethernet in between.
- kbumsik 7y agoThe newer version is even more interesting and it's just released on the market now: NUC 9 Extreme/Pro Kits. [1] It's got i9/Xeon options, 3 NVME drives, and even PCIe x4 and PCIe x16 slots. It's bigger but still quite small. The PCIe slots are the killer feature to me. [1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/kits/nuc9vxqnx.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
- dannyw 7y agoIt's incredible. I just wish pricing came down a bit; I am happy to pay a premium for the form factor but this is too much.
- blinkingled 7y agoYeah it's touching 2k USD without RAM / storage or OS. I don't know if many homelabbers are going to buy that just for the form factor. Building a small box with 8-C Ryzen would be an interesting exercise.
- devonkim 7y agoThere's no practical reason to use this new box for homelab folks compared to some older micro workstations that came out a year or so ago that had E3-class Xeons in them at least. For an entry of $2k it's easily worth it now to find some old Xeon D mini ITX based boards and plop them into inexpensive cases with SFX PSUs. Old gear is the bread and butter of the homelab experience and people dumping. The hard part with AMD building is mostly the ECC DIMM motherboard support experience but SMB-class hardware still is a Good Idea for prosumer and homelab folks due to software compatibility (read: drivers and less cost-driven gotchas ala winmodems) compared to consumer hardware.
- woodrowbarlow 7y agowith support for optane memory too, nice.
- rwmj 7y agoDo these have remote manangement? IIRC there are only a few NUC models that have BMCs (or Intel's equivalent - AMT).