VMWare Lab Plans (Vet my Setup)

[vintagedon]

Am planning to do a lab for both production stuff at my home, and a lab to practice towards my certification, and would just like someone to vet this setup, and give any suggestions they may have towards improving it.  90% of it's already in and setup, the rest is in transit, with the only thing not purchased yet being the 2nd gigabit switch.

Note that I am a systems administrator for a enterprise class hosting company, am quite familiar with Linux and Windows (definitely more of a Linux slant), and have used VMWare Workstation for personal stuff, but am otherwise new to that corner of the industry.  If anyone has any good, solid suggestions for VCenter5 books, I'd appreciate that also.

My house is also properly networked (Cat6 drops in every room w/HTPCs, desktops, and other sundry items like network BluRay players), I have a large, very cool temperature basement with under the stairs built out into an enclosed space for all the gear (a central storage server/domain controller plus three HTPCs live here, all the network drops here for the house, and an air conditioning duct outlet), as well as a self-built 24U four-post server rack, and 2 dedicated 20A drops for power there.

For iSCSI, I'm using the free version of Starwind for iSCSI targets, which also allows 128GB of HA storage.  So, presenting a primary iSCSI target off my existing domain controller for the house, and also two HA nodes, running on SSDs: one in the domain controller, and one on the primary HTPC for the house.

ESXI Node 1 and 2 (identical)

=============================

Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, w/4 Gigabit NICs each (2 onboard + 1 dual Intel Pro/1000), diskless (USB boot), and 16GB of RAM each

ESXI Node 3

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Whitebox, KGPE-D16 w/dual 6128s, 64GB of RAM, 4 GB NICs (2 onboard + 1 dual Intel Pro/1000), diskless

ESXi Host Total: 32 cores, 96GB of RAM, 12 GB NICs

iSCSI Node 1

============

Starwind running on the domain controller for the house, w/dedicated 2TB sata (non-HA storage) + dedicated 128GB SSD (HA storage, node 1).  This is in addition to a 9650se w/8x2TB in RAID6 for use as the house NAS (movies, etc).  3 Gigabit NICs (1 onboard, 1 dual Intel Pro/1000)

iSCSI Node 2

============

Starwind running on the primary HTPC for the house w/dedicated 128GB SSD (HA storage, Node 2).  3 Gigabit NICs (1 onboard, 1 dual Intel Pro/1000)

Network

=======

All CAT6, tied to 2 24 port gigabit managed Layer 2 switches (went with 2 x 24 ports, instead of a single 48 port so I'd have the advantages of a multi-switch network).  Have a Netgear WNR3500L w/DD-WRT as my gateway and a Juniper SSG5 Firewall also.

Power

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2 x 20Amp dedicated drops (each on their own breaker), and a rack mount 3000VA battery backup.

Licenses

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Enterprise level licenses for all nodes and vCenter (generously donated by work)

Microsoft Tech Net Professional subscription

Thanks Muchly,

VintageDon

[nielse]

Nice setup but it looks power consuming (atleast those DELL servers are). If you don't mind the power usage you could get started with this setup.

Even tho you have a whitebox with 64GB ram (maybe possible to add more?) I would suggest running nested ESXi on this if needed. 64GB RAM is quite a lot.

Regarding the iSCSI nodes, not sure if you will need that much storage but it might be an idea to have 1 iSCSI box and 1 NFS box. In that way you can test both protocols and play around with them.

Not much notable furthermore from my side. Good luck with the whole installation plan/setup!

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the communities.

That's a pretty solid setup. I will add this - don't be afraid to destroy it and rebuild it several times in your learning process. I found that trying to have one lab setup with minimal equipment that could cover ALL of the objectives listed in the blueprint was very tough. I found that constantly reprovisioning was a necessity in the process, but that only helps you learn more.

Good Luck!

[vintagedon]

Nielse:

Thanks for the observations, and yep, I realize both 2950s are power hungry boxes, but for $150 each for dual quad cores w/16GB of RAM and 2 x 73GB SCSI drives, I figured that those were a ridiculously cheap way to start with two nodes.  If nothing else, I can resell those a bit a later at least at cost (probably a bit higher), and move into more power-sane whiteboxes.  For now, my electricity is cheap, so I'm not too worried about it.

As for the whitebox, yes, I can add more, and fairly cheaply.  The box will take up to 64GB non-ecc or 256MB ECC (16 slots), and I have 8 x 8GB ECC in it at the moment, so plenty of headroom (I could expand to 128GB with all 8GB sticks).

Was thinking on the iSCSI nodes, I could also share out NFS shares to have both iSCSI and NFS available.  If nothing else, I do have another box (HTPC) that I could share out a NFS share on that would be discrete from the iSCSI shares.

Last pieces of the lab arrive this week, so this weekend is build time.  Biggest enjoyability here was building out the 20U server rack out of 2x4s and audio rack rails.  Slapped some 300lb. casters on it, and it's perfect for my needs.  http://thehomeserverblog.com/home-servers/diy-19-server-rack-for-home-servers-and-or-esxi-vmware-lab...

VMRoyale:

Thanks, and I agree about rebuilding.  This is just to start, and as I play with Fault Tolerance, and more, I'll probably continue to play and swap things out.  As I said above, the 2950s are just to get the nodes started, and I'll probably, at some point, resell them, and add whiteboxes to replace them with better Direct I/O support and power consumption.

[AndreTheGiant]

The 2950 are quite old, but if is the III version it can run well also vSphere 5.1.