I’m building some orchestration tools built on govc and my own project runnable-markdown. It works; but from a product
or product designer perspective it’s kind of a failure.
It’s all about the APIs stupid
govc means you’re a licensed ESXi user. This license, with access to the APIs, means you’re paying about $1200USD per year.
But the challenge is that not all the APIs are supported on ESXi and so you ne might need vCenter which adds massive cost
just for some orchestration scripting.
Looking at the money…
Looking at the hardware, my Intel NUC Skull (i7, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD) is $2200. A similar machine (based on the square Intel NUC) costs the exact same and is a 10th gen processor compared to the 8 of the skull. However, for the price of ESXi [a] you could buy the new hardware and build it all out. [b] Or combine the cash and get a thelio with a ton of RAM and COREs.