Purpose
This is essentially the same lab as the Gen2 lab, but with some small changes.
- This lab runs VCF
- This lab has 4 nested ESXI hosts, 2 running on each physical Super Micro.
- 10Gb Switch between them.
That’s it. So I’m not sure you can even call it Gen3, except for the switching components that were added. In previous blog posts I wrote about the performance limitations when having multiple nested ESXis under the same vCenter, with a 1GB link between then. So moving that to a 10GB definitely removes that as the bottleneck. My true bottleneck with this lab, is now the Core counts.
VCF takes a lot of Compute, and it is difficult to run with only 2 physical CPUs and 8 cores each.
Lab Specs
- 2 SuperMicro
- 8c – 16 Threaded each
- 256 GB Memory & 128 GB Memory
- 4 TB SSD Storage each
- Total Lab Capacity
- 16c – 32 Threaded
- 384 GB Memory
- 8 TB SSD Storage
Interested in building your home lab?
Check out these tutorials on how to install/setup each of the components.
- Home Lab Component List – List of parts to buy for this home lab setup.
- Network Diagram – This should give you a pretty good idea of the nested setup
Step by Step Guide to build your home lab
- Build the SuperMicro Server – Some pictures of the build process
- Installing ESXi on SuperMicro – This is the old guide, but it’s the exact same. Just a newer version of code. Use the newest version available.
- Configure NTP on the ESXi Hosts – Configure it on all physical and nested esxi hosts/vms.
- Configuring the BareMetal ESXi7 – Network settings, storage, etc..
- Deploy a DNS Server – I’m using a simple bind/named dns server running on Centos8
- Configuring nested ESXi VMs – Deploy the 3 nested ESXI vms
- Deploying vCenter and vSAN on nested ESXi – Deploy the vCenter appliance and configure vSAN
- Create NSX Distributed Switch – Create Distributed switch in vCenter.
- Deploy vyos router – For iBGP between home network and overlay network
- Deploy NSX-T – Deploy and configure NSX Manager and Edge
- Troubleshooting NSX-T
- Upgrading to 10Gb Links – From 1Gb to 10Gb between the Physical SuperMicro hosts