Egregoros

y'all remember that period of time where ESXi was the be-all end-all of virtualization? so much so that several big computer hardware companies put SD card slots onto the server motherboard directly.

and not just ONE, but multiple, in a RAID mirror configuration, in case one of the SD cards, as they were kinda likely to do in that era, would just shit the bed, you wouldn't have an unbootable ESXi server.

We lived in wild times.

the ESXi era was irritating as fuck. Only vmware could get away with such an absolute dogshit hardware compatibility list.

I remember the time I built out my own homelab server (a "whitebox" super micro build) . I SPECIFICALLY looked up the motherboard I was purchasing to make god damn sure it would work with ESXi.

Oh, it worked.

but the built-in RAID controller didn't. So I couldn't do RAID arrays. At all.

so, there was more than one time where I woke up, found a dead drive in the server. and THAT was the drive that was housing half of my VMs. and it just took a gigantic shit.

it wasn't very long afterward that broadcom acquired vmware, and suddenly told everyone who was using the free version of ESXi to go eat shit, and charged their remaining customers renewals with a few extra zeroes in the renewal quote.