Home all in one server - ESXi with freenas as a VM or freenas with VMs?

[John Doe]

is it worth the upgrade from 6.7 to 7.0 or shall I wait?

 

[joeschmuck]

is it worth the upgrade from 6.7 to 7.0 or shall I wait?

I'm not sure, I need to figure it out for myself, someone else might be able to provide an answer. I plan to look at the new features of ESXi 7.0 and more importantly what limitations have been placed on 7.0 when not using vCenter.

But since VMware is providing updates for ESXi 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 all the time (for now), I don't see a security reason for the upgrade and basically, if it work, don't mess with it. But I like to tinker so I may mess with a perfectly running system and have to rebuild it later.

 

[Evertb1]

is it worth the upgrade from 6.7 to 7.0 or shall I wait?

I have upgraded to 7.0 on my homelab but until now I don't see much benefit of it. Would it have been a production server I would not have bothered with it. I am running ESXi as a stand alone solution for temporary VM's for development jobs and supporting FreeNAS storage and the new features in 7.0 are mostly not for me. I found a comparison table between 6.7 an 7.0 here.

 

[joeschmuck]

I found a comparison table between 6.7 an 7.0 here.

Great link. I was also reading of other differences on the VMware site, little things like VM backup software capability has changed, and some other stuff like removing CPU support for older CPUs (that are not really that old), I'm still reading it when I get a break in work. I will try it out for certain, on a different server.

 

[Evertb1]

that are not really that old

In this crazy IT world "old" is relative. I run ESXi on a 6 years old CPU ( Xeon E3-1246V3). A smartphone that old is almost antique . But I suppose/hope that the folks at VMWare know their market and that at least older mainstream CPU's are supported within reason.

 

[Yorick]

One gotcha is that the LSI 2008/2308 variants appear to be unsupported now from 7.0. You can still pass them through, but you may have to redo that after every reboot of the host. For more on that see this discussion.

Which means 3008, or I suppose 3200 but that sounds like overkill for a lot of builds.

 

[Evertb1]

One gotcha is that the LSI 2008/2308 variants appear to be unsupported now from 7.0. You can still pass them through, but you may have to redo that after every reboot of the host.

AFAIK the Dell PERC H310 is based on the LSI SAS 2008 (B2) chipset. I have one in my ESXi lab system, passed through to a FreeNAS VM. I reboot ESXi and FreeNAS regulary because I use the system for all kind of things. Today alone I have done that two times. Until now the HBA has not given any problem. It shows up in ESXi as "Passthrough Active" and the pools in FreeNAS are available. I can not dispute the experiences of other people but fact is that I did not encounter any problem.

 

[joeschmuck]

One gotcha is that the LSI 2008/2308 variants appear to be unsupported now from 7.0. You can still pass them through, but you may have to redo that after every reboot of the host. For more on that see this discussion.

Which means 3008, or I suppose 3200 but that sounds like overkill for a lot of builds.

That was an interesting thread to read, some folks have issues, a few do not. So my initial advice to someone is to do your research before upgrading, as I'm doing now. If it doesn't make sense to upgrade and VMware is still providing updates to support the version you are running, then don't upgrade your software until your hardware can support it. I can't wait for the weekend when I can play with this on a separate server. If it all looks good and may be an improvement, I'll backup my main server and then try the upgrade and keep my fingers crossed. Also 33Hops XSiBackups is claiming to work fine with ESXi 7.0. This is the software I use now and it works fine for my needs, and free is good.

This thread has been very helpful and appreciated.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

33Hops XSiBackups

@joeschmuck - Thanks for that. I've been looking for something free!

 

[Evertb1]

So my initial advice to someone is to do your research before upgrading

Sound advice Joe. My lab server is handy to have but not really critical, so I can toy around a bit with it. On my main server I would not dream to do an early upgrade, unless there is a problem to resolve.

Also 33Hops XSiBackups is claiming to work fine with ESXi 7.0.

You saved me the work to look that up. Good to know. Thanks.

 

[Yorick]

If using vSphere, there is a reason to move to vSphere 6.7 at least, even if ESXi stays at 6.5: Full HTML5 support. Flash goes away 12/31 this year, so getting off "Flash" on everything is kinda critical.

Check BMC firmware too, there's a bunch of older versions that use Flash, depending on vendor. Don't get caught flat-footed :).

 

[Evertb1]

XSiBackups is claiming to work fine with ESXi 7.0.

@joeschmuck In response to your submission I decided to dowload the current free version of XSiBackup here . However in the table with the Features overview, only the DC edition is marked as comptabible with ESXi 7. Do you have a source that contradict that? Because that would be nice.

I found this thread on the 33Hops forum but the last entry was from april 13 this year.

 

[joeschmuck]

@joeschmuck In response to your submission I decided to dowload the current free version of XSiBackup here . However in the table with the Features overview, only the DC edition is marked as comptabible with ESXi 7. Do you have a source that contradict that? Because that would be nice.

I found this thread on the 33Hops forum but the last entry was from april 13 this year.

I have nothing, I expected them to provide it for free as they have in the past to use home users. I would not pay for the product and instead look for other free options for home use. If I were a business that is a different story.

So I just pulled out my second server that I used as a firewall, but it does have ESXi 6.7 installed, I just need to update it a little. I plan to update it to 7.0, probably not tonight, I want to test the hardware out a little bit to ensure it survived the move. Once I've updated it to 7.0, then I will give XSiBackups a try, see if the older version works, test the latest version as well. So my second server is a Supermicro A1SAM-2550F with 16GB RAM, a 128GB SSD as the boot device and two 500GB laptop hard drives as datastores. Very basic setup. And I did notice that it booted up very fast once the OS started to load. I very well may sell this machine to someone who wants just a good NAS, not a hard core VM running FreeNAS machine. The CPU just wouldn't cut it, but as a simple NAS, it would work great. But time to test the hardware, then get ESXi 7.0 installed.

P.S. I think the thread has taken a turn from the topic. Once I'm setup then I could start another thread to discuss ESXi 7.0, or anyone could, just stick a link here for us to follow.

 

[joeschmuck]

As promised, I created a new thread where we can discuss ESXi 7.0 and how it changed (good or bad) from ESXi 6.7 or 6.5. This will ensure that we do not take over this thread.

Link to thread

Happy Testing!