Anyway back on topic, the previous two posts touched on Why do we put ourselves through the whole Home Lab headache, what use cases do we see and I listed some that I believe are out there and I am sure you guys have more you can add and then in the second post we touched on the use cases for my home lab and why I do things the way we do, and reading back its like some of the content was actually taken from an executive summary for a customer high level design.
I want to touch on the hardware resources I have today in my lab but also some of the things in my head about expanding this home lab footprint.
Hosts
SuperMicro 32GB – The best server in the playground, most RAM and best CPU as well as local disk a plenty. This really houses the majority of the home lab for me and in particular my current storage VSAs (However this will change later on) This being a full on 2U rackmount server it’s not too bad on noise and with my rack being in the same office as my WebEx sessions and calls I don’t believe this server affects the quality of audio.
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SuperMicro 16GB – Finally we have the second SuperMicro box, only 16GB here and considerably noisier than the big brother shown above. This is outlined or highlighted for nested Hyper-V, System Center and some other niche BETA testing, with it being noisier this cannot be on during the days I am working from home but it does add some extra power to the lab combined system.
All of these hosts run a flavour of VMware vSphere ESXi, in the upcoming posts I will dive deeper into how these look and why these have been configured in this way. |
Storage
Lots of Direct Attached
MSI has an SSD running the Windows OS as well as the lab virtual machines, there is also a capacity drive not used for anything regarding the home lab.
SuperMicro 32GB = 10TB of spinning rust.
SuperMicro 16GB = 6TB of spinning rust.
HPML110 G7 = 1TB of spinning rust.
NETGEAR ReadyNAS 716 – 5TB of Hybrid disk, capacity tier on SAS and also 2 x SSD
NETGEAR ReadyNAS 312 – 1TB of spinning rust – really used for ISO media and home shares.
Networking
Dell 1GB Managed Switch
BT Broadband Router
Linksys Wireless Router
Linksys wireless extender (Living Room)
Software
VMware – courtesy of vExpert
Microsoft – msdn subscription
MOAR
We always need Moar right, apart from sickness and illness we don’t need any more of that! But anyway as I was building out the above I was starting to see some flaws to this design of mine. Virtual Storage Arrays are taking up more and more resources and in the current configuration, I could run maybe 1 or 2 of these Storage Arrays but it was going to put the hosts quite close to the edge.
In true HomeLab style I was on eBay looking for the next bit of hardware. I wasn’t sure what would cover this requirement but knew it would be on eBay that’s for sure. Apart from the ML110 mentioned above and a few little bits everything else has come from the eBay powerhouse of HomeLabs.
No difference on this occasion I found a SuperMicro 4 node server in a 2U form factor.
Next up I want to walk through more detail on the storage layout and networking. As always thanks for reading and please provide any feedback @MichaelCade1 / @vZillaUK