Aren’t vSphere licenses a bit expensive for the average homelab? I personally went with a larger former workstation with more cores and RAM, because I expect to only ever have a single node, even if I’d love to have a full cluster.

VMUG Advantage membership ($200/year) gets you a 6 socket, non-production license for basically the entire VMWare catalog.

For $0/year I can run Linux and ovirt.

That won't help you very much if the goal is to maintain familiarity with VMware products (which is the entire point of the VMUG licensing scheme).

I found recently that they got 500 bucks license for 6 CPUs now! I think it is doable since it is lifetime license (without updates though after a year(?)).

just the ESXi hypervisor is free for non-production use.

The newer version is even more interesting and it's just released on the market now: NUC 9 Extreme/Pro Kits. [1]

It's got i9/Xeon options, 3 NVME drives, and even PCIe x4 and PCIe x16 slots. It's bigger but still quite small. The PCIe slots are the killer feature to me.

[1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

It's incredible. I just wish pricing came down a bit; I am happy to pay a premium for the form factor but this is too much.

Yeah it's touching 2k USD without RAM / storage or OS. I don't know if many homelabbers are going to buy that just for the form factor. Building a small box with 8-C Ryzen would be an interesting exercise.

There's no practical reason to use this new box for homelab folks compared to some older micro workstations that came out a year or so ago that had E3-class Xeons in them at least. For an entry of $2k it's easily worth it now to find some old Xeon D mini ITX based boards and plop them into inexpensive cases with SFX PSUs. Old gear is the bread and butter of the homelab experience and people dumping. The hard part with AMD building is mostly the ECC DIMM motherboard support experience but SMB-class hardware still is a Good Idea for prosumer and homelab folks due to software compatibility (read: drivers and less cost-driven gotchas ala winmodems) compared to consumer hardware.

with support for optane memory too, nice.

If you just want network between them, you should actually be able to connect them directly with a thunderbolt cable, no need for Ethernet in between.

Me too, they are so tiny and powerful! Just got the 64GB Frost Canyon one, awesome little thing. Running it with an Nvidia 2080Ti via Razor Core Chroma and Ubuntu 20.04. GPU Compute (CUDA) works, which is really the only thing I need it for, but I cannot get it properly working with a display though.

Do these have remote manangement? IIRC there are only a few NUC models that have BMCs (or Intel's equivalent - AMT).