Home Lab

Included below are the details about my home lab designs over the generations.

Generation 3 – Home Lab with VCF

After the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, the new focus was on VCF. So to make sure I can compete in that world, it was time to learn VCF. The only thing new about this lab, to warrant calling it a Gen 3 lab, was that I added 2 10GB ethernet NICs (via PCIE) to each server. I needed to be able to increase my vSAN and vMotion transfer rates between the nested esxis on each host.

Lab Specifications

  • 1 SuperMicro server
  • 16 CPU (32 cores threaded)
    • 8 CPU (16 cores threaded) each
  • 384GB Memory
    • 128GB Memory on server 1
    • 256GB Memory on server 2
  • 4TB SSD
    • 2TB of SSD storage each
  • 4 1GB ethernet links (1 in use)
  • 2 10GB ethernet links (2 in use)

Software Running in the lab

  • 7 Nested ESXi VMs
    • 4 for VCF Management Domain
    • 3 for VCF Workload Domain

Generation 2 – Home Lab with NSX-T

I love the idea of these single server, isolated workhorses. They are quiet when not running a large workload, and they don’t consume a ton of power. So I bought a second server, and outfitted it with 256GB of memory. Never really hit any CPU or memory limits with this lab. The only issues I ran into were slow 1GB connections between the 2 servers.

Lab Specifications

  • 1 SuperMicro server
  • 16 CPU (32 cores threaded)
    • 8 CPU (16 cores threaded) each
  • 384GB Memory
    • 128GB Memory on server 1
    • 256GB Memory on server 2
  • 4TB SSD
    • 2TB of SSD storage each
  • 4 1GB ethernet links (1 in use)

Software Running in the lab

  • 3 Nested ESXi VMs
  • vCenter
  • vSAN
  • DNS Server
  • pfSense Router/FW
  • WCP (Tanzu Kubernetes for vSphere)
    • 1 Supervisor Cluster
    • 1 Guest Cluster
    • ~10 Pods
  • Avi Controller & Service Engines
  • NSX-T
    • NSX Manager
    • NSX Edge

Lab 2 Setup

Generation 1 – Home Lab

Overall a single server was awesome. Gave me a ton of experience with VMware products. Learning to deploy them, break them, blog about them. The only reason for Gen2, was I wanted some more power 🙂

Lab Specifications

  • 1 SuperMicro server
  • 8 CPU (16 cores threaded)
  • 128GB Memory
  • 1TB SSD
  • 4 1GB ethernet links (1 in use)

Software Running in the lab

  • 3 Nested ESXi VMs
  • vCenter
  • vSAN
  • DNS Server
  • pfSense Router/FW
  • WCP (Tanzu Kubernetes for vSphere)
    • 1 Supervisor Cluster
    • 1 Guest Cluster
    • ~10 Pods
  • Avi Controller & Service Engines

Lab 1 Setup