I had several Windows VMs running in VMware Workstation 25H2 on my Windows PC and wanted to migrate them across to my ESXi 8 host (esx03) for centralized management under vCenter.
Along the way I hit two blockers in sequence:
vmx-22 hardware family not supported during OVF import into ESXi 8
vTPM encryption requirement — the VM failed to create because it had a virtual TPM but VM encryption wasn’t configured on the standalone host
I wanted a centralized monitoring platform for my homelab that could monitor:
The challenge was that most of my infrastructure lives behind NAT at home, and I did not want to expose services publicly or configure complex port forwarding.
I built a hybrid monitoring architecture using:
This design allows cloud-hosted monitoring while keeping home infrastructure private.
Network-wide ad blocking using AdGuard Home deployed as a VM on ESXi. Blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains at the DNS level — before they reach any device on the network.
Created a new VM in the ESXi web UI with the following settings:
I attempted to install ESXi 8 on my Dell OptiPlex homelab machine, but during boot, I encountered a Pink Screen of Death (PSOD) with errors like:
The issue is caused by modern Intel CPUs (12th Gen and newer) using a hybrid architecture with:
ESXi expects uniform CPU cores, so it crashes when it detects different core types.
My home network uses a dynamic public IP address, which changes periodically. This breaks remote access to my self-hosted services.
I used an open-source tool (cloudflare-ddns-updater) to automatically update my Cloudflare DNS records whenever my public IP changes.
Save the token securely.