VMware Homelab Build

October 19, 2014 VMware Homelab

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  •  3 host setup with a minimum of 32 GB of memory in each host
  •  VMware VSAN testing (hence the 3 host minimum)
  •  Migrate Standard Virtual Switch to a Distributed Virtual Switch
  •  Setup a 2 NIC 10 GBE network configuration (more on this later
  •  Layer 2 and layer 3 networking with trunking of VLAN’s
  •  Preparation for the VCAP-DCA certification
  •  I can mention more, but you get the point
One of the things that I really needed this lab for was my lack of knowledge on the networking side of the VMware architecture. So when I first saw a tweet about Networking and VMware in one book, I knew I needed to get it.  The book is written by Chris Wahl and Steven Pantol and titled Networking for VMware Administrators (Chris donates all the profits to the Alzheimer’s Association), I got the printed and eBook copy from Pearson.  The authors do a very good job of giving you a visualization of what they are teaching and have allot of pictures and diagrams and who doesn’t like pictures.  I used Chris Wahl’s Haswell home lab build as the base for my lab and made a few changes along the way to meet my requirements.  Chris does a great job of detailing each piece of hardware, check it out here http://wahlnetwork.com/2013/12/02/new-haswell-fueled-esxi-5-5-home-lab-build/ and make sure to watch his YouTube videos linked to his website.

Here is the hardware list with links embedded (I bought most of the hardware from Amazon)

It has been quite sometime since I built a PC/Server from parts, so hear it goes. The Lian Li case is very nicely built, it is made out of aluminum, very light and has a slide out chassis to mount the system board. It has 2 side access panels you can take off while mounting your hard drives and routing your cables.  The Orico aluminum brackets work well and I mounted a total of 4 HDD in each host for future testing of VSAN.  The installation of the memory and CPU were very straight forward, no surprises.  The SeaSonic power supply is fanless and you connect what cables you need into the rear of the power supply to connect to the system board.

The Supermicro system board has 4 memory slots and supports 32 MB of memory.  It has 6 SATA3 ports for a maximum of 6 devices.  The Onboard USB is very nice for installing the 8 GB USB drive for the esxi install. It has a built in video card, dual 1 GB NIC’s, USB ports, IPMI port and a serial port.
By Jaison Bailley