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:
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:
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 🙂
