I have long wanted to learn/run VMWare in my environment. Face it, experimenting with something is always better done in one’s own personal, controlled space than it is in, say, your employer’s production environment. So with that said, I finally pulled the trigger on a new (to me) system. It is also being heralded as my first-ever eBay purchase. (Scary!)
Behold the HP Z440 “workstation”. Shipped with Windows 10 Pro (who needs it?), a 256 GB SSD (already swapped out for a 1 TB), a couple of 500 GB hard drives (which likely won’t be in there for long) and an Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processor with 14 cores. It also conveniently included a DVD drive, though I don’t imagine it getting much use (unless this becomes the machine I rip my discs on).
All of that is great, but the real draw was the 128 Gigabytes of RAM that is just waiting for me to have my way with it (and have my way with it I shall).
I have up to this point installed Ubuntu 18 on it just to see if it saw everything (which it did); now I have to figure out the whole ESXi thing. I will document my trials and tribulations here as time (and sanity) permits. Onward!!
Whoa, that’s a hoss! I tried running it on my Synology, not nearly enough hardware. It did work… Sorta….
I finally got ESXi installed last night, at which time it immediately became apparent how very little I actually know about it. Guess I’ve got something to keep me occupied this weekend.