The Virtualisation Journey: The Saga Continues.

 A couple of months ago, I virtualised everything including my PC. 

I have, in the garage a server, running VMWare's ESXi. It's a development server from my perspective and I do a lot of testing stupid ideas before I go to work and replicate them there on it. 

I got to a point that I even put in a graphics card, attached that to a virtual machine that become my "Desktop" and connected a monitor, keyboard and mouse. For the most part, it actually works. 

It worked better before I upgraded to the current version (8) of ESXi. Now, any VM that has audio getting passed through a graphics card (there are 2), gets an awful stutter that I haven't been able to fix. 

I'm an edge case. Few people do this kind of thing on this kind of hardware for this kind of reason. It's enterprise hardware doing a budget job. More ironic if you knew how much this server cost (most HAMs have purchased houses costing less). 

I did it as a power saving exercise. Adding the graphics card to the already running server added 30w to its power consumption. As opposed to the PC that I was using that had a CPU alone drawing most of 70w, plus that again for the graphics card.. then there's the current drawn by the other components. 

Everything configured right, it works out reasonably well (as long as one has the "Desktop" set to auto start on the server power up). The audio issue is annoying, and I'm really not in a position to roll back. I need to be on this version of ESXi8 - I don't have this expensive toy just to do what I want. 

It's also not the only issue. 

I have a HBA passed through to another VM (A disk controller in "IT mode" rather than RAID which allows it to see individual disks). This is technically another server chassis with all of the SAS channels connected to a SAS expander board, connected in turn to a board that allows connecting external cables, which link to another external connector board, which then connects to the HBA card inside the server. 

That VM acts as my storage server and shares those disks over NFS. 

For whatever reason, "something" is happening to cause NFS to die every so often - often it seems when the backups are running. NFS dying than has a flow on effect. I have numerous other servers that have those mounts and write to them regularly. If those disks go away, then other things start dying and from there things get messy. 

A lot of things need to get restarted in a fairly specific order to recover. 

Yesterday I reseated all the disks (not an uncommon thing when using SAS backplanes), but because I'm using a cheap HBA rather than a decent hotswap friendly RAID controller, that meant the HBA wasn't happy. In real world terms, that meant I had to restart the whole damned server. Fun.

I can't quite see any evidence of a specific disk failure. Or an actual controller failure. Or anything else. Trial and error testing when everything including my PC is affected is.. well.. time consuming. 

I have paths forward. Right now there are 10 hard disks being passed through. That won't be the case for that much longer. I've got some working coming up where I'm going to salvage a lot of large SSDs which will go directly into the server. They'll replace a good chunk of those hard disks. The remainder will go into a USB 3.0 enclosure that I'll pass through. Less potential points of failure. 

I'm also going to unvirtualise my PC. 

I had a Microsoft Surface that I purchased second hand a year ago before Bathurst - I was after a simple and small device to take away because I didn't want to take a work laptop full of things I didn't want too risk loosing. I don't much like Microsoft stuff, but the form factor and specs were good for what I needed and I could dual boot it between Windows for work, and Linux for myself to use. 

Recently I discovered a problem with the Surface. After a couple of hours use - streaming video or connected to a monitor, the image would get shaky and go out of focus. Finally it with glitch badly. I'd paid for a protection plan on it - knowing full well the reliability of Surface devices (I was a tech when they came out and the Surface Pro 4 was the last model I ever had familiarity with). 

I finally got a message on Friday that they had worked out that they couldn't fix it (I could have told them that), and they asked me to pick a new product. I don't need another - my old "service" laptop was retired but never made it to ewaste (it's over 10 years old and has gone through 4 different positions with me). I'll get it setup to do what I need. 

I chose instead to go for a HP EliteDesk 800 G4. They're a small form factor PC (something else that I'm also quite familiar with). It'll have enough horsepower to do what I need (mostly run web browsers). The CPU competes fairly well with what was in my old Desktop PC... though I might miss the 32GB RAM. I'll probably upgrade this one at some stage as 8GB won't last me long. The entire power consumption of these is about the same as that of the graphics card currently in the server to run my virtual Desktop. And I'll get my audio back. 

I'm likely to throw out the two GPUs in the server and replace them with a single, higher powered one from my old desktop once I import the correct power cable for it. They're kind of under powered and my media server (that has the other card) struggles a bit. 

Radio? I do have a virtualised server for radio too - it runs my SDR and uses DragonOS. For whatever reason, its desktop runs insanely slow despite the resources given to it. The web interface for OpenwebRX+ itself is fine when accessed externally. 

I can't do a lot else though - USB audio isn't supported by ESXi, so passing through the radios to a VM has pretty limited use beyond CAT control. 

Overall, it's been an interesting experiment, but I need my sound back. Everything else I've been able to tolerate - but the audio. That's a problem for me.