Cisco UCS Home Lab Computers & accessories

Introduction

Starting from ESXi 7 and above VMware have dropped support for VMKlinux which is a mechanism whereby hardware drivers written for Linux can be used by ESXi. This is different from a “native” ESXi driver which either VMware or the hardware manufacturer has developed specifically to use a piece of hardware with ESXi. Many of the RAID cards in servers from many vendors (Dell, HP, Cisco) are rebadged LSI RAID controllers. Quite a few of these made use of VMKlinux drivers. The effect of this is that quite a few home lab servers (and even servers in use in corporate environments) cannot be upgraded to ESXi 7 with ESXi 6.7 being the last release to support VMKlinux drivers. You may only want to run 6.5 or 6.7 at the moment (which our serverswill do just fine) but if you will eventually want to move to ESXi 7 we have you covered