Let’s be honest. I never knew this was or could be a thing. I heard about ESXi previously while doing research on home labs and NAS options. However it always struck me as far too advanced, needing specific equipment requirements, and something I simply didn’t need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently I came across a Network Chuck video concerning running a Kemp Load Balancer (see this post) for free. As you may know free is one of my favorite four letter f words. While looking into this option my initial thought was to run it in unRAID as a virtual machine. However that did not work. I was doing some research and discovered you could run it in ESXi. For the above listed reasons I kind of gave up on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not long after I came across an October 2020 video from Data Knox<\/a> where he put ESXi on a Raspberry Pi. Now my interest is peaked. Raspberry Pi’s are amazing, mostly inexpensive and if they can now run these kinds of programs perhaps I need to reevaluate my position. I did some research and I downloaded the instructions (Fling-on-Raspberry-Pi.pdf<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first started with an old raspberry pi that I had laying around and quickly discovered that it simply was not powerful enough to do what I wanted it to do. I also found Data Knox difficult to watch. I don’t really know why, but again I set the project aside. However the idea stuck with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few days later Network Chuck was recommended to me by YouTube and low and behold he had a video covering the same topic! I finally broke down and bought a 8gb Raspberry Pi 4<\/a> and followed Chuck’s video instructions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coffee break! <\/p>\n\n\n\n