I have a server I built 2 years ago that just had its SSD die, so it's a perfect time for me to upgrade my OS, from ESXi 5.5, to potentially ESXi 6.5.
How I've been using 5.5:
For free, with their free license key for one CPU socket
With PCI passthrough for my storage controller for one of the VMs
5 VMs
32GB RAM
Supermicro X10SL7-F
Managed with fat client on Windows
My questions:
Does anyone see a problem with trying to continue this on ESXi 6.5, for free?
They're still doing the free license, and it's fully functional on a single socket, right?
How do people manage it? Fat windows client? Web client? Something else?
Can I run VMs created with ESXi 5.5? I was lucky to be able to save the VMs onto a separate datastore.
Is 6.5 ready for production or do you think it's buggy?
Thank you.
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I'm really new to these tools. I've been using Virtualbox to tinker with virtualization on my laptop for a while, but now I want to set up a 'legit' hypervisor to keep learning more.
Ultimately I'm only planning on running ~5 guests on a single CPU (quad core) system with 16GB RAM. This is really just for personal tinkering, so I'm not looking for anything crazy performance-wise. I'm exploring ESXi 6 as an option, but I have some questions before I dive in.
1) Is ESXi 6 the right choice for me? I see other alternatives (e.g. Citrix, MS Hyper-V), but it looks like the community around ESXi is more robust, which will be important to me as a new learner. I've looked at feature comparisons, but so far it looks like the major differentiators are beyond what I'll be playing with as a new learner (e.g. I'm not going to be using direct device mapping, live running-VM migrations or anything weird like that; just hosting some pretty standard machines).
2) If ESXi is a good choice, is there any reason not to use the latest (v6 I think)? Any reason to stay back with v5 for now? (Maybe better support? Maybe v6 has kinks they haven't worked out yet?)
3) From what I have read, I can do this for free if I'm just tinkering at home and not doing anything 'fancy'. The hypervisor itself looks straightforward (link), I just need to install 'vSphere Hypervisor', right?
4) Where I'm really confused is in the management piece. I understand that the hypervisor just RUNS the guests, but not much configuration can be done on the hypervisor itself. You apparently need some other 'piece' to do the management (setting up guests and managing their resources). I think this piece is 'vSphere' (link), but I'm not sure. When I visit that page, I only see 'Try it for free' types of links, and no 'free' version. But what I've read online has said that you can mange a few servers with limited numbers of CPUs/RAM for free. Is there a 'free' or 'lite' version of vSphere I should be looking for? Do I just install the free trial 'Demo' and keep using it beyond the 60 day trial? If so, I assume some functionality shuts off at 60 days - what do I lose at that point?
Thanks!
EDIT: Wow, downvotes. :- Anything I could do to make this post more appropriate for this subreddit? I've been doing my research - just asking for some help from the experts.