My Home Lab
Just a quick post to share what I run in my home lab. It’s a straight forward setup and most of the hardware was purchased in 2015 to replace my previous lab which ran on HP Microservers and HP ML115’s. I know there are some guys out there with mini DC’s / enterprise setups but this suits me fine for now and has a high scoring WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). As of early 2019 my lab has the following,
- 3 x Lenovo TS140 servers, each with a quad core CPU and 32GB RAM
- 1 x Synology DS1815+ with SSD caching to improve performance
- 1 x Cisco SG300-10 1Gb switch
- 1 x Cisco SG300-20 1Gb switch
I’ve configured the Synology to support both iSCSI and NFS storage and have a few datastores presented to the cluster. I try to keep the lab as clean as possible and only run a few core VMs. Everything else runs in a nested environment. Why? Nested labs are easy to deploy/automate and if I nuke something I can just blow it away and start again.
All the VMware software is licensed using my vExpert licensing entitlement. For those just getting started I’d encourage you to look at a VMUG Advantage Subscription as you get a ton of licenses included in the cost along with the other benefits.
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