Simon’s Lab

Published on 9/1/2014 - Read in about 2 min (423 words)

This article is now 9 years old! It is highly likely that this information is out of date and the author will have completely forgotten about it. Please take care when following any guidance to ensure you have up-to-date recommendations.

To help me study and learn like many others I have had to build a lab that will be small, quiet and well suited to home use. This has now changed as I needed moar power.. so what I have now is a little different from the original lab I had built a few years ago.

Hardware list

1x Dell Poweredge C6100 (with 4 blades 2xCPU and 24GB RAM each )
1x Gigabyte Brix GB-XM12-3227 (Intel Core i3 3227U 1.90 GHz – 16GB ram – Crucial m4 60GB mSata)
Synology DS412+ 4 Bay NAS (2x 3TB SATA 2x 120GB SSD)

Hardware setup

Workload cluster

The Dell Poweredge C6100 is not the quietest option on the market but it is available for a very good price if you know where to look. I opted for one with 4 blades, each with 2x CPU and 24GB RAM. IN the near future I will utilise the drive bays for a VSAN build to compliment my Synology NAS.

Management cluster

The Brix’s come without ram or mSata drives so its entirely up to the user how they want to configure them. The back plate is easily unscrewed and access to the memory slots and mSata slots is excellent I had no trouble at all fitting the extra components.

The Brix’s do have small fans but are barely noticeable which was an important factor in my choice however they did seem to have a habit of defaulting to the HDMI port whether in use or not.

Software installation and configuration

I used a portable USB powered CD-ROM to install the ESXi hypervisor with no problems at all. Everything was picked up which made life very easy.

Storage configuration

Recently I have upgraded to a Synology DS412+ (supports VAAI) and I am using the built in SSDCACHE feature that the Synology DSM offers.

I am currently running iSCSI rather than NFS (which I know is popular with a lot of homelabs atm)

Networking

I am using a Cisco SG300-20 (20 port Gigabit Manager switch)

This is one of the most popular switches for homelabs and for good reason it is virtually silent and packs a lot of features and can be run in layer 3 mode!

I am utilizing many VLANs to separate out management, storage, vMotion and any other traffic I wish to isolate and to emulate any given work environment.

Frankly you would be hard pressed to find a better switch for the money (that is silent), you can even disable the LEDs if you so wish.