VMware vSphere Lab
Posted on 17. Dec, 2010 in VMware
Over past years, I have had a lab at home that allows me to tinker with new technology and ever since VMware ESX 1.5, I have had at least a few systems dedicated to virtualization.
Previously, I used old hardware that I would manage to get for free from retired systems. Hell, I even remember using Asus BX motherboards, Adaptec 2940 SCSI adapters and a shared SCSI array that allowed me to play with VMotion. Yeah, that’s right, VMotion using shared SCSI. It was crude, but it worked.
Last year I finally decided to invest in new hardware that would last me a few years, play with the latest features of vSphere, including FT, and of course store my personal movie and music collection. Even though this setup is slightly overkill for the average Joe, I do use this lab almost daily.
The entire setup consists of 4 ESXi servers connected to an iSCSI SAN via a single HP switch. Ideally, I would have two switches for redundancy, but then again, it’s just a lab. Each ESXi server has one CPU, 8 GB of memory, two network adapters and zero local disks. Since there are neither local disks nor CD-ROM drives, they use USB to boot ESXi. This was a design decision to keep the ESXi server as bare as possible and keep the potential hardware failures to a minimum. This also allows me to pre-load the hypervisor to a USB flash drive, insert into the server and boot. Using this method, I can reload a system in about 5 minutes.
This is what the entire setup looks like today:
This is what it would look like if I had a redundant network switch.
The servers pictured above are generic white boxes, but if you are running a SMB and are considering virtualizing, replacing the white boxes with Dell T-series servers would be my recommendation as all the hardware would be officially supported.
If anyone has any interest to build a similar lab, I have included the part list and prices at the time of purchase.
| Part Description | Price | Quantity | Total |
| Asus P7P55D Motherboard | $150.00 | 4 | $600.00 |
| Intel Core i5 LGA 1156 CPU | $200.00 | 4 | $800.00 |
| Crucial 2GB Memory Module CT25664BA1339 | $48.00 | 16 | $768.00 |
| Broadcom BCM5751 PCIe x1 NIC | $20.00 | 8 | $160.00 |
| Sandisk 2GB USB Flash Memory | $8.00 | 4 | $32.00 |
| Promise VessRAID 1840i | $2200.00 | 1 | $2200.00 |
| Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3750330NS | $160.00 | 9 | $1440.00 |
| HP 1800-24G Switch | $150.00 | 1 | $150.00 |
| APC UPS SUA3000RM2U | $400.00 | 1 | $400.00 |