| I've been fascinated by home labbing for a while now, and maintain something with comical simplicity. ESXI 8.0.1 worked out of the box with the 7090 I was given. I'm migrating it from 6.7u3, which is running in 14 year old hardware (injecting the drivers was easy btw - finding the drivers was difficult). ESXi is not managed with vCenter, it's a standalone host. I'm hosting a handful of VM's that do everything I need. Critical items are never sorted solely on the server; they're stored on three remote sources, with integrity checks , and mock restorations. Fortigate 140d PoE, which handles a phone system and all of the PoE I need. Backups are simple. No RAID, again, critical stuff is not solely on the server. I use enterprise disks, and SMART - I'll get a notification with ntfy if something gets wonky. Server is consuming 60-160w. 16gb of RAM, non ECC, 5th gen i5, 12TB of storage. Homebridge, home assistant, scrypted, Asterisk, Samba, Timemachine backups (all containers configured with compose, checked into Git) windows 10 and 7 VM's All of the hardware is second hand, with exception to the disks. Ambient in the closet is 29, no dedicated cooling. UPS with cyberpower. Glad to see you're using solar, and that your hardware too is used. When I worked in the industry they'd toss stuff I could never afford... FWIW: Proxmox seemed like something new to learn entirely, ESXi seemed similar for me; I don't mind the RAID stance, or the licensing... |