The last month has been both more productive than I had expected and yet less productive than I could have hoped. The main gist of it is that my DNS/DHCP server is running and my Optiplex is running ESXi, but I've been delayed and slowed down by schoolwork. I'll go into detail on those in the rest of the post, but one thing first - it feels good to do administration work again. I haven't done much all summer, maybe a couple custom Systemd scripts, but actually setting up and managing the lab feels great.

Now, for the main course: setting up ESXi. I'm not going to go into details on how I did the setup because you can find tutorials everywhere, instead I'll just talk about my experience and the pitfalls I found along the way.

When installing ESXi, the first issue I ran into was simply getting my hands on the free installer. Their website didn't seem to want to work on Firefox, so I had to switch to Chromium for it to load for me. After that it wanted me to sign up for an account, then I had to register for the free ESXi download and provide a company name. The problem is that I don't have a company name, so I had to check to make sure N/A was acceptable. It worked, so I finished signup and downloaded the .iso file for the ESXi installer, which I then threw onto a USB drive with dd. This is where I hit the next problem - the file isn't bootable by default. After some research, everyone suggests using Rufus because you have the option to create bootable media which just means that Rufus puts a Windows bootloader on the drive. Since I'm using Linux, I didn't have access to Rufus and had to find another solution, leading me to this site. After that, everything else was smooth sailing.

I have to admit that I was a bit nervous about using ESXi. I shouldn't have been - the interface for it is much more intuitive than Proxmox's. First of all, I don't have to use a specific port (8006) to access the web frontend; second, there's a clear button labeled "Virtual Machines" on the left side. Formatting and adding the SSD storage I have hooked up was also easy, as was uploading a CentOS disk image file to install onto the VMs. Overall, this is a massive improvement over Proxmox and I wish I had made the change sooner. Oh yeah, and I'm not being bugged about purchasing a license every time I log in. The only downside I can see is lack of container support out of the box, and that just might be a lack of knowledge on my part.

With my main lab done, I've migrated the creative Minecraft server out of storage (a .tgz file saved to my workstation) and it's running just fine. I also have a replica of my survival server which is currently on Digital Ocean. Unfortunately I had some trouble with setting up a DNS CNAME record to point to my dynamic DNS address, so I'll need to do some research to make sure I can even do that in the first place. Other than that, the lab is running smoothly.

Last, some basic planning for my next steps (and hopefully next entry): * Set up a Wireguard VPN server - I don't need all the power of OpenVPN, and Wireguard should hopefully tax a Raspberry Pi 3 much less * Create a storage server - This will probably be created out of my Asus VivoPC since its current hardware is pretty lightweight * Figure out PXE boot - This one isn't absolutely necessary, but I want to try to get a Kickstart file set up so I can do unattended installation * Set up a basic git server - I'd like to use Ansible scripts eventually, and a local git server will be nice for backing them up

Some of this, such as the Wireguard server, will be easy to do over the weekend. Some of it, such as PXE boot, will take more setup. The git server will probably run on another Raspberry Pi 3 unless I feel like sticking it on a VM, but I don't think that's going to be necessary. I'm hoping to make my next entry in just a couple weeks rather than a whole month later, but we'll see how everything else goes!