esxi 5 home lab advise

[jitla1971]

Hi All

Just need confirmation.

I am setting up a new home lab, i will have 1 Dell T310 and 1 HP ML110 G6 server.

Want to install esxi 5 on both servers and would like to test vmotion, drs etc between both servers.

The cpu on both servers will be intel xeon x3430 quad core.

Do you think i will face any issues, by having servers from 2 different vendors?

If so would buying a i7 quad core laptop with 8GB ram, using workstation, be a better solution for a home lab?

Thanks for all your help.

Jit

[Bahou]

Hello,

You should not have any problems with vMotion or DRS if the CPUs are identical.  How much RAM do you have in each server?

As far as Workstation, 8GB of RAM is a little low in my opinion if you really want to be able to test everything or setup a test environment for your production environment.  If you deploy the vCenter Server Appliance then I would certainly recommend more then 8GB, especially if you run the embedded DB.  I run a desktop with Workstation 8 that has 16GB and it runs no problem with 6GB given to each of my 2 hosts.  As I'm sure you've heard, using something like Openfiler is a great way to emulate storage SANs for a test environment.

[jitla1971]

Hi Bahou

The Dell Server will has 10GB RAM, whilst the HP Server will have 16GB RAM.

I think i will go for real server option, rather than laptop.

Just need to source a dual port nic for the hp server.

Thank you for your reply, much appreciated.

[RaZaKKaZaR]

Hello Jit,

I agree with the other poster: 8 GB is barely enough to get a decent-sized environment going and test out all functionality.

If you will build a 100% virtual environment, consider getting an SSD with at least 200 GB of storage (OCZ Vertex 2\3 or Intel 320\510 depending on which version of SATA your laptop supports) to really get decent performance.  A regular HDD is ok if you will be doing individual physical nodes, but a VMware Workstation 8 100% virtual environment will crawl.

When you get your feet wet with Openfiler, consider trying out EMC Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) like the Uber models built by Nick Weaver: Uber Celerra and Uber VNX and open an EMC PowerLink account to download the required utilities to integrate their management into vCenter.  There are many guides, blog posts, and YouTube videos on how to use them.  The Uber Celerra is more mature and can even be used to setup replication and test out VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Enjoy

[jitla1971]

Hi RaZaKKaZaR

Thanks for the tip, really appreciated.

I have decided to go down the physical server route.

That way i will get proper server hands on skills and will be more real world like.