I’ve installed ESXi 6.5U1 on a new Ryzen desktop and I’m having issues. The VMs seem to run fine and perform admirably. The issue I’m having is with the web GUI. It seems to throw unhandled exceptions, lock up or just flat out deny login until it’s rebooted. It’ll then function fine for a day or two, then require another reboot.
It occurred to me that it might be running out of memory, but I only have two VMs running constantly, one using 8GB and the other 1GB. The host has 16GB of RAM, which should be plenty.
I’ve tried going through the logs, but I’m not an ESXi veteran and am not sure what to look for. If I can’t figure this out, I may go ahead and migrate to Linux. I’ve set up Proxmox and KVM a few times before, but it was a pain compared to setting up ESXi, especially GPU passthrough. Can ESXi VMs be migrated to KVM?
If I remember correctly, ESXi wasn’t fully supporting any of the Zen stuff yet. Could be wrong. Make sure you are using the latest version of ESXi and see if that helps.
Have you tried upgrading to ESXi 6.7? Chances are they’ve ironed out a lot of kinks, especially with Epycs being so similar to Ryzen processors.
I like KVM, but when are they going to get vSphere-like single-pane-of-glass management, integrated high-availability, web management, etc. ? Plus, in normal (read: non-ryzen) situations, ESXi resource management smokes KVM. I was running them both to see which one I like better and I definitely noticed I could run a lot more VMs on the same hardware in ESXi (KVM started having very noticable slowdowns and weird behavior). I might also mention, I never had any weird incompatibility issues with basic OS ISOs in ESXi (KVM I couldn’t install a Windows 2016 ISO - WTF??!!)
I did try ESXi 6.7, and continued to have issues. Some of that might have been due to the Radeon reset bug, but I’ve already migrated to KVM w/Nvidia. I’m still having issues with random shutdowns about once a week, so it’s possible I may try ESXi again at some point.
To address your rant, Proxmox provides KVM with a web gui and may be what you’re looking for. Your complaint about resource management probably still applies to Proxmox, though.
Yeah, setting GPU passthrough up is such a pain, if you’ve actually gotten it working I can understand the hesitance to try anything else.
I like Proxmox. I like barebones KVM better though. I actually am kind of a fan of the headless + GTK client thing, it reminds me of how ESXi used to have a ‘real’ client instead of the web GUI stuff. I miss that.
If I’m not mistaken you can use Proxmox headless. I think the default install is console only with no desktop environment. But it is harder to configure for GPU pass through than virt-manager.
EDIT: Yeah, the windows client was much better than the ESXi web client. But it was Windows only, which was disappointing.