The homelab shift…

I believe that we are at a point of time where we will see a shift in the vSphere homelab designs.

One homelab design, which I see as becoming more and more popular is the Nested Homelab using either a VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion base.
There are already a lot of great blogs on Nested homelabs (William Lam), and I must at least mention the excellent AutoLab project. AutoLab is a quick and easy
way to build a vSphere environment for testing and learning, and the latest release of AutoLab supports the vSphere 5.5 release.

The other homelab design is a dedicated homelab. Some of the solutions that people want to test on the homelabs are becoming larger and with more components (Horizon, vCAC), requiring more resources. So it is painful to admit, but I believe the dedicated homelab is heading towards a more expensive direction.

Let me explain my view with these two points.

The first one and the more recent one, is that if you want to lab Virtual SAN, you need to spend some non-negligible money in your lab. You need to invest in at least 3 SSDs on three hosts, and you need to invest in a storage controller that is on the VMware VSAN Hardware Compatibility List.

Recently Duncan Epping mentioned once again that unfortunately the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) standard for SATA is not supported with VSAN, and you can loose the integrity of your VSAN storage. Something that you don’t want to happen in production and loose hours of your precious time configuring VMs. Therefore if you want to lab Virtual SAN, you will need to get an storage controller that is supported. This will cost money and will limit the whitebox motherboards that support VSAN without add-on cards. I really hope that the AHCI standard will be supported in the near future, but there is no guarantee.

The second one, and the one I see as a serious trend, is network drivers support. Network drivers used in most homelab computer are not updated for the current release of vSphere (5.5) and don’t have a bright future with upcoming vSphere releases. 

VMware has started with vSphere 5.5 their migration to a new Native Driver Architecture and slowly moving away from the Linux Kernel Driver that are plugged into the VMkernel using Shims (great blog entry by Andreas Peetz on Native Driver Architecture).  

For all those users that need the Realtek R8168 driver in the current vSphere 5.5 release, they need to extract the driver from the latest vSphere 5.1 offline bundle, and need to injected the .vib driver in the vSphere 5.5 iso file. You can read more about this popular article at “Adding Realtek R8168 Driver to ESXi 5.5.0 ISO“. 

My homelab 2013 implementation uses these Realtek network cards, and the driver works good with my Shuttle XH61v.  But if you have a closer peak at the many replies to my article, a big trend seems to emerge. People use a lot of various Realtek NICs on their computers, and they have to use these R8168/R8169 drivers. Yet these drivers don’t work well for everyone. I get a lot of queries about why the drivers stop working, or are slow, but hey, I’m just a administrator that cooked a driver in the vSphere ISO, I’m not driver developer.

vSphere is a product aimed at large enterprise, so priority in the development of drivers, is to be expected for this market.  VMware seems to have dropped/lagged the development of these non-Enterprise oriented drivers. I don’t believe we will see further development of these Realtek drivers from the VMware development team, only Realtek could really pickup this job.

This brings me up to the fact that for the future, people will need to move to more professional computers/workstations and controllers if they want to keep using and learning vSphere at home on a dedicated homelab.
I really hope to be proven wrong here… So you are most welcome to reply to me that I’m completely wrong.

 

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28/03/2014 Some spelling corrects and some

Adding Realtek R8168 Driver to ESXi 5.5.0 ISO

Update 20 March 2014. With the release of VMware ESXi 5.5.0 Update 1, this blog post is once again very popular. A lot of other articles, blogs and forum discussions have been using the Realtek R8168 driver link to my website, and this is starting to take an impact on my hosting provider. I therefore have had to removed the direct links to the R8168 & R8169 drivers on this page. These drivers are very easy to extract from the latest ESXi 5.1.0 Update 2 offline depot file which you can get from my.vmware.com . You just need to open the .zip file in a 7zip/winzip and extract the net-r8168 driver and use it with the ESXi Customizer.

vib_path

Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

The ESXi 5.5.0 Build 1331820  that came out yesterday, did not include any Realtek R8168 or R8169 driver in it. So if your homelab ESXi host only has these Realtek 8168 network cards, you need to build a custom ISO.

The most simple tool to use is Andreas Peetz’s (@VFrontDEESXi Customizer 2.7.2 tool. The ESXi Customizer tool allows you to select the ESXi 5.5.0 ISO file and include into it a new Driver in .vib format.

You can then download and extract the VMware Bookbank NET-R8168 driver from vSphere 5.1 ISO or download it from the following link for your conveniance.

VMware_bootbank_net-r8168_8.013.00-3vmw.510.0.0.799733

VMware_bootbank_net-r8169_6.011.00-2vmw.510.0.0.799733

Launch the ESXi Customizer and build your new .ISO file

ESXi-Customizer_ESXi-5.5.0_r8168

This will create a ESXi-Custom.ISO file that you can burn to a CD and use to install vSphere 5.5 on your host.