Hello community.
please give your opinion and possible explanation. This is for my homelab on a dell R620.

ESXI can virtualize and so can Unraid. Why use one solution or the other?
What are the pros and cons of each solution?

This server dell R620 has 10 disks (two SSDs and eight HDDs SAS).
I will use the first SSD drive as the system drive for WIN10 and the two HDDs for data.
A second SSD disk as a cache for Unraid and six HDDs for data.
Will the Basic license be enough for me if Unraid uses six HDDs for data?

 

Thanks for any info

6 minutes ago, dz61 said:

Will the Basic license be enough for me if Unraid uses six HDDs for data?

Probably not as all drives visible to Unraid count towards the licence limit (except for the boot flash drive) regardless of whether they are being used by Unraid or not.

Heyo, I personally use ESXI and virtualise a Unraid within it. I find Unraid awesome for the Data storage option with their way of handling a very flexible "unraid".

ESXI on the other hand gives me very high flexibility when it comes to actually hosting lots of things in my home lab with failover clusters etc.

But to be honest most extra features ESXI offers are not needed for most people.

 

Overall the choice depends on what you want:

 

1.  Focus on Storage / Focus on easiness of use -> Unraid

2. Focus on Hosting / VMs etc. -> ESXI Community Edition

Then there is also Proxmox that could be worth a view depending on your needs. Its a bit like ESXI just open source and more homelab suited while ESXI is more Enterprise focused.

 

 

 

But isn't the Free ESXI a thing of the past with the new company policy ?

 

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/broadcom-owned-vmware-kills-the-free-version-of-esxi-virtualization-software/

Yes, as @ChatNoirpoints out the free ESXi has been killed by Broadcom. I would suggest that Proxmox vs Unraid is a better comparison. Proxmox is an industry standard open source hypervisor that would do well in a homelab that offers a focus on virtualization with features like clustering, replication, VM snapshots.

yeah, ESXi is dead, RIP. Had my ZFS under ESXi/freeBSD running on it with a passthrough LSI HBA. Worked well over the years. I moved for my virtualization stuff to xcp-ng but decided to have a dedicate NAS box running unRAID; same as for my router. Moved from ESXi/pfSense to Ubiquiti. Somehow router and NAS are more "critical" for the infrastructure and downtimes of one should not impact other services. Ok; we are talking homelab-style of setup; nothing business-critical. But family is unhappy if Youtube or Discord is not working while I play with VMs. And for my NAS I wanted to remove one layer of complexity/dependency; hence dedicated physical box. 

You might find that XCP-ng suits your needs better than Proxmox, but it depends on your requirements.