Home Lab upgrade!
Hi Folks, recently I wanted to «upgrade» my home lab, and I was thinking the best way to have an affordable, low consumption usable home lab for a ESXi Cluster, nothing fancy, just to be able to deploy a couple of little VMS, play with HA, DRS, shared storage and so on.
I started checking out the Intel NUCs, but then I realized that it comes «empty», so it becomes costly at the end.
Then, what about HPE Gen 8-9 Servers, «the wife would kill me»
They are noisy, expensive and consumes tons of electricity!
So, looking over the hardware I have, I looked into my Workstation, a Lenovo P320 which it has 64GB of ram, more than sufficient to run a Nested lab, but I wanted something more realistic, with wires and lights, you know, Im a hardware and wires lover!
I kept the Workstation as base Server, Planning tu run there the base or foundational vms I normally run like: vCenter, DNS, AD, a Storage Appliance and a Veeam Server.
lets keep it «low profile», so, Nowadays normally we do have a laptop or workstation capable enough to run a vmware workstation or a ESXi to place a vcenter instance and a Windows Server machine, pretty basic.
Then, I though, I need a switch, and I had an «old» 1Gbps Router – switch capable of Vlans, so perfect for this task.
Now Im just missing some hosts to add to the picture, and I found these little guys:
Looking at them, they were quite perfect, the top performing setup has a 4C processor, 8GB of RAM, and a local NVME 32GB, so perfect for a ESXi mini server.
Ah! forgot to say: it has a 4x PCI-E and 2 SATA Ports!! Amazing!!
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Everything was going soooo good, until the tragedy came,
Realtek Gigabit Ethernet, not supported by vmware vsphere…. nooo!
but wait a second, I told you already they’ve got a PCI-E port?
Exacly, I looked over into my warehouse, and there you go! a 4 Ports Intel NIC card!
Fully compatible and ready to be installed!!
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Now, with all setup, lets get into it, installing Vsphere 8, no problem!!
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NIC Card, OK, system ready and first boot OK!
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Then I did the same operation with the other two Zima mini CPUs I’ve got!
Configured the initial parameters, IPs, Hostnames, DNSs, etc. and ready for next steps!
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By the time, I setup a vCenter instance and a Software Appliance for Storage, Simple NFS datastore for home lab experiments, a Quantum DXiv Community Edition.
After a few configurations, added those three ESXi hosts into my vcenter instance, create the cluster, and let it build, and…. Voila!
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The cluster was up and ready to be used!
Let me show you a few pics of how it looks now from the vCenter perspective!
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The normal electrical consumption for this little guys is around 6W each, pretty low, a little more with the Ethernet PCI-E card, but nothing overkilling like a full server, and not counting noise and hit!
My overall cost, taking into count that I do own the workstation, switch and I made the Ethernet cables, around 200$ per Zima Server, so around 600$.
if you plan to start low, you can do it with only two Systems, so around 400$ + shipping.
Hope you enjoy it, and don’t hesitate to give them a try and have some fun!
will try to follow this up, and upload some future info, tests and ideas.
cheers!