As you might have seen in my previous post, I now have an Intel NUC to set up as an all-in-one server. It should handle all the docker containers I previously had running on my PC and serve as a NAS. Other than that, I had plans for having an LDAP server and DNS server as a backend for Pi-hole.
My initial thoughts were to use an Ubuntu server for everything that I mentioned above. But I wanted anything running on Ubuntu to be in the form of a container since otherwise managing configurations becomes a pain. I still had an option with the DNS server with powerdns and many web UIs for the same, but the LDAP server was a different thing. I could not find any good containerized LDAP server + web UI for it.
Enter virtualization. The next course of thought was to run a windows server for DNS and LDAP and the host OS or an Ubuntu VM for everything else. Unraid was an excellent proposition, with built-in support for docker and good virtualization, but a lack of free tier pushed me away. I could have gone with proxmox , but since I had a much better experience using ESXi, that’s what I chose. VMware provides a free ESXi license for up to 8 cores per VM which was much more than what I had (2c/4t), let alone what I can assign per VM. Most of the time, we are bottlenecked by the RAM much before the core count causes any issue, so running this on the NUC should be easily useable.
I continued to install 7.0U1 as it had the community fling ne1000 VIB pre-installed, which is needed to recognize the gigabit ethernet port (I219-V) of the NUC I have. William Lam’s website is an excellent website for anything on ESXi and in general VMware. But that was short-lived since an update to ESXi 7.0U2 removed that driver, and I had to create a custom ISO including the community driver . The steps outlined here work well.