[jan-jaap]

I'd be interested to know how that goes.  I did look into the eval free ESXi 6.5 a while ago...I didn't know NUCs were workable.  Do you have a whole site license or are you just using the free edition?  Please let us know if this goes smoothly or if you found any tips/tricks to get it working.

ESXi works out of the box on the NUC series. They seem to be quite popular for homelabs because of their size and low power consumption. You can find a ton of information on sites like virten.net and virtuallyghetto.com.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

• Most NUCs have only a single ethernet interface. If you want to virtualize a router you'll want at least one more. Easiest and cheapest is probably a USB3 ethernet dongle but that's not officially supported and requires some hacking in boot scripts. Another option is to use thunderbolt and the Apple TB-to-ethernet dongle. If you want to go fancy you can get a TB-to-10Gbe adapter but it'll use as much power as the entire NUC.
  
  
• Official memory limit for most NUCs is 32GB but they take at least some 64GB kits just fine.
  
  
• You will have to do without ECC RAM, Xeon CPUs, remote management, console redirection, redundant storage and PSUs, but you don't get those in your average home router either. Your wife will love you for not mounting a Proliant DL380 in the utility cabinet ;-)
  

In my case the lack of the 2nd ethernet interface was the biggest downside, but I couldn't find anything with (1) a proper, non-Atom CPU, (2) non-realtek ethernet, and (3) documented ESX support. The NUCs are popular for a reason. I will probably go with the Apple TB ethernet dongle. I chose an SSD with power-loss protection to hopefully avoid corruption in case of unexpected power cuts.

The lack of hardware redundancy means potential downtime in case of failure, but hey, it's a home network. The use of ESX also means hardware abstraction -- if this things fails in a couple years I'll just buy another VM host and rebuild it on that. Right now the server which hosts techpubs.jurassic.nl (and a few more) is an aging Jetway Atom, and if that fails I have much bigger problems.

I use the free ESXi license so I basically manage the ESX side of things through the builtin Web interface. I have some other VMware software (Fusion/Workstation/Remote Console) to get to the console of the VMs if I have to. I don't have access to a site license / I'm not willing to fork over a couple of thousand to VMware, otherwise I guess you could build a HA cluster with three NUCs and do failover and load balancing. But no. The aim here was a bit of flexibility and hardware consolidation, not sysadmin masturbation.

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OK in all seriousness, this item is like a logical X-Ray machine for electronics, it’s “the” black box PCB fault finding instrument.

That is pretty interesting. I'm looking forward to your adventures with that.