(Re) Building a Home Lab

I bought a refurb Dell Z820 and decided to build a homelab. I started with proxmox and kubespray to deploy a production ready kubernetes cluster — and it was great, but support for proxmox was a bit more “non-production” than I was wanting. ESXI 7 offers a better (more modern) web UI and better terraform support for spinning up cloud init servers.

This is just a documentation article, but for others who might want to do something similar, this is my documentation.

Creating a VMware login

First things first, I had to register on VMware’s sites to download and get a valid license — once I did that I downloaded the installation ISO:
https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/7_0

Get an ISO USB Installation Creator

I used Rufus, because Balena Etcher didn’t create a valid USB install media — Good old Rufus took care of me . I downloaded it from https://rufus.ie/en and once I had the ISO downloaded, I popped a USB into my desktop and used the defaults to create a bootable ESXi USB for version 7.0.3.

Install it on your server

Different brands have different boot menu keys — for the Dell Z820, it was F9, but your mileage may vary — google your model computer and the boot menu key and you should get some results that give you what you need. The installation will ask you to pick a root volume to work with, and if you’ve never done this before, just expect to do it one more time after you’ve done some googling on RAID devices and how to configure a proper RAID1 or RAID5 setup, depending on how many drives you’ve got — you don’t want a failed drive to ruin your homelab, and while SSD/NVME drives are way more stable than spinning disk used to be, you don’t want a failed drive to take down all your work

Set a real root password

I cannot stress this enough — get a password manager and set a real root password for the server. It will be a pain in the ass during setup, but I guarantee if you’re building a homelab with any intent to expose anything publicly this will be absolutely vital. I use https://www.lastpass.com/ but there are others that work great. Once you’ve generated a real root password continue the install.

ESXi is pretty straightforward, so just follow the prompts and google when you get confused or worried you might not know what to do.

Check out your fancy web UI

Newer versions of ESXi come with a builtin web UI — once your server finishes starting up it will give you an IP address to start things up on. Find your root password and enjoy a new ESXi server for all the VM experience you’d ever need to start getting into devops or anything else!