Home Lab

I had started building my Home Lab shortly after I joined VMware PSO back in 2011, since then I have modified & added plenty of components and went through different configuration scenarios.

As of today, my Home Lab looks as below:

 

Home-Lab_01

in Summary, my Home Lab consists of:

  • 42 Units Servers Rack.
  • 4x Hosts, each has Intel Core i5 (Quad cores) & 32GB RAM
    • 2x DELL OPTIPLEX 9010
    • 1x DELL OPRIPLEX 790
    • 1x Manually assembled Host (White Box) with Intel Motherboard & Full Tower case
  • Each Host has 5x Physical NICs (1Gb/Full Dup./Jumbo Frame)
    • Single Port (Intel Gigabit CT PCI-E Network Adapter EXPI9301CTBLK)
    • Dual Ports (Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter)
  • For sake of optimal VDI environment, the following Hardware components added to the assembled Host:
    • 240GB SSD (running vDesktops on it)
    • nVidia GRID K2 (to support vSGA)
    • AMD FirePro v7800P (to support vDGA)
  • Dedicated networks for vMotion, Storage, Production traffic
  • All Network connectivity is 1Gbs / Full Duplex / Jumbo Frame
  • Synology DS1512+ 5-bays NAS, which contains:
    • 2x SSD [120GB] configured in RAID1 and used as Cash
    • 3x HDD [2TB] configured in RAID5 (2+1)
    • 2x 1Gbs NICs
  • LG N2R1D 2-bays NAS
    • 2x 1.5TB HDD configured in RAID1
    • 1x 1Gbs NIC
    • Used mainly as SMB share for Production environment
  • 1x Zero Client (Tera1)
    • EVGA PD02

Below you will find how it looks like in real life:

Home-Lab_02

Currently I am running the following Software/VMs there:

  • ESXi 5.5u1 / vCenter 5.5u1 (appliance)
  • There are the following Infrastructure VMs running:
    • Windows 2012 AD (2x DCs)
    • MS SQL 2008 R2 Server
    • RDSH Server (Windows 2008 R2)
    • Linux CentOS VM used as Router between VLANs
    • Control Centre (Windows 7 Pro 64-bits)
  • The following VMware solutions running:
    • VMware Horizon View 6.0 (facing the Internet)
    • VMware Horizon Workspace 2.1 Portal
    • vCOPS 5.8
    • NSX 6.1

My next in my to-do list for my Home Lab is to build VSAN Lab by using Intel NUC … I need just to find the budget and time for it 🙂

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