Home Lab Question

georgejurcan · 2015-04-21T18:41:06.000Z

I figured it was finally time to set up a dedicated home lab. A laptop running Hyper-V on 8GB of ram can only host 3 VMs, and iffy at that (seriously sketchy laptop lol).

The catch is that I’d like to be able to run VMWare ESXi on it and start learning about other Hypervisors. The beauty with Hyper-V is that it runs on just about anything that has VTX just fine.

So can I build a computer and run ESXi off it? Or will I need one of the servers on the HCL list to be able to run ESXi/vCenter/vSphere etc at home? Im not looking to host anything magestic at home, just a handful of VMs learning about tech and increasing my skillset.

So far my school has been kind enough to provide free versions of all software I need to learn, Server 2012R2 DC, Sharepoint 2013, Exchange 2013, MDOP, and it offers some VMWare stuff too.

So the 1 million dollar question, do I need, for home use, a server off the HCL, or can i build my own computer with an 8 core CPU and 32GB of ram and stick ESXi on it - again stability isn’t key here as its not production.

If the question sounds silly its because I have virtualization experience but only with HyperV.

@HP @Dell_Technologies @Lenovo

Rod-IT · 2015-04-21T18:46:01.000Z

You can build a ‘white box’ to run ESXi but there are caveats.

Whatever route you take be sure to use an Intel NIC for least problems.

The HP ML110 / ML115 / ML310 all seem to be about a good starting point (from the HP side)

I use ML310e Gen 8

gabrielle.l · 2015-04-21T18:47:33.000Z

A lot of workstations that are not on the HCL will run ESXi without problems – My test labs at work have been just that, I have (and continue to) run ESXi on different versions on some Dell, HP and Lenovo workstations without issues. It’s just tough to say beforehand what problems (if any) you could run into. A few tips:

Intel network cards tend to be the most stable, and others hit-and-miss. Worst case you can buy a $30 card or 2 if the onboard one gives you grief.

Onboard hybrid / “fake” RAID will not work. If a test environment I usually don’t worry about redundancy on the disks since everything I do can be lost without headaches. If you really want disk redundancy, you can look at an inexpensive RAID card.

Rod-IT · 2015-04-21T18:48:03.000Z

The HP microservers also work fine, but they are limited with ram and CPU power, although the Celeron and i3 versions are likely a bit better

jfrappier · 2015-04-21T18:52:26.000Z

Here is what I am running - Windows 8.1 with Workstation, capable of running 3x ESXi (virtual) hosts, vCenter, vRealize Automation, DC, SQL, etc. http://www.virtxpert.com/8-core-32gb-ram-360gb-flash-2tb-dual-nic-home-lab-part-list/

Also keep an eye on Woot.com - just the other day they had an HP z600, dual quad-core Xeon’s that could go to 48GB of RAM

Gary-D-Williams · 2015-04-21T19:05:58.000Z

Rod-IT:

The HP microservers also work fine, but they are limited with ram and CPU power, although the Celeron and i3 versions are likely a bit better

Yup, that’s what I use. I keep my VM’s all very low spec and sometimes they are a bit slow but they do the job.

briantrump2322 · 2015-04-21T19:07:02.000Z

I built a whitebox PC using an Gigabyte motherboard and an AMD phenom processor along with two PCI-E Intel NICs. Got everything rolling on the Intel NICs and then was able to roll the drivers in for the onboard NIC as well. Also running an Adaptec RAID card with two RAID1 arrays. Haven’t had any issues at all. I run my personal home server (Ubuntu) on there as well as a Windows 10 test VM on there.

There is also a pretty good VMWare forum “support” out there for us techies looking to do a home lab. I don’t have a good link handy, but I did find it very useful in figuring out my home setup for a couple little quirks I was running into.

mike-dresser · 2015-04-21T19:07:52.000Z

I have an ESXI toybox at home as well, using a 3ware 9650 or 9750(can’t remember which!), which I had to hunt down drivers for… ESXi 5.5 doesn’t support it, but it works… no promises that 6.x will work with it though, but I can deal with that.

georgejurcan · 2015-04-21T19:10:09.000Z

Gabrielle.L:

A lot of workstations that are not on the HCL will run ESXi without problems – My test labs at work have been just that, I have (and continue to) run ESXi on different versions on some Dell, HP and Lenovo workstations without issues. It’s just tough to say beforehand what problems (if any) you could run into. A few tips:

Intel network cards tend to be the most stable, and others hit-and-miss. Worst case you can buy a $30 card or 2 if the onboard one gives you grief.

Onboard hybrid / “fake” RAID will not work. If a test environment I usually don’t worry about redundancy on the disks since everything I do can be lost without headaches. If you really want disk redundancy, you can look at an inexpensive RAID card.

Nah I don’t need redundancy, I would just reinstall everything if worst came to worst. I’d probably opt for like a 2-3TB drive and call it good.

georgejurcan · 2015-04-21T19:12:49.000Z

Jfrapp:

Here is what I am running - Windows 8.1 with Workstation, capable of running 3x ESXi (virtual) hosts, vCenter, vRealize Automation, DC, SQL, etc. http://www.virtxpert.com/8-core-32gb-ram-360gb-flash-2tb-dual-nic-home-lab-part-list/

Also keep an eye on Woot.com - just the other day they had an HP z600, dual quad-core Xeon’s that could go to 48GB of RAM

Which version of ESXi can you run on that system?

Rod-IT · 2015-04-21T19:13:28.000Z

Holo:

Gabrielle.L:

A lot of workstations that are not on the HCL will run ESXi without problems – My test labs at work have been just that, I have (and continue to) run ESXi on different versions on some Dell, HP and Lenovo workstations without issues. It’s just tough to say beforehand what problems (if any) you could run into. A few tips:

Intel network cards tend to be the most stable, and others hit-and-miss. Worst case you can buy a $30 card or 2 if the onboard one gives you grief.

Onboard hybrid / “fake” RAID will not work. If a test environment I usually don’t worry about redundancy on the disks since everything I do can be lost without headaches. If you really want disk redundancy, you can look at an inexpensive RAID card.

Nah I don’t need redundancy, I would just reinstall everything if worst came to worst. I’d probably opt for like a 2-3TB drive and call it good.

You may want to get 2-3 smaller drives as separate LUNS if you’re not using RAID, keep the loads down instead of thrashing one disk.

georgejurcan · 2015-04-21T19:16:15.000Z

Rod-IT:

Holo:

Gabrielle.L:

A lot of workstations that are not on the HCL will run ESXi without problems – My test labs at work have been just that, I have (and continue to) run ESXi on different versions on some Dell, HP and Lenovo workstations without issues. It’s just tough to say beforehand what problems (if any) you could run into. A few tips:

Intel network cards tend to be the most stable, and others hit-and-miss. Worst case you can buy a $30 card or 2 if the onboard one gives you grief.

Onboard hybrid / “fake” RAID will not work. If a test environment I usually don’t worry about redundancy on the disks since everything I do can be lost without headaches. If you really want disk redundancy, you can look at an inexpensive RAID card.

Nah I don’t need redundancy, I would just reinstall everything if worst came to worst. I’d probably opt for like a 2-3TB drive and call it good.

You may want to get 2-3 smaller drives as separate LUNS if you’re not using RAID, keep the loads down instead of thrashing one disk.

While in theory I would care about that I’d like to believe drives came along enough to where I can write a few hundred TBs and still be fine. plus I’ll be tossing in an SSD as the primary drive they VMs install on, and move the VMs once the install is complete/setup the way I want. That’s what I currently do on my 8.1 machine with client HyperV. I load the server, make changes/whatever I need, and when its done it gets moved to slower storage.

briantrump2322 · 2015-04-21T19:33:25.000Z

Consider looking into an SD card to SATA adapter to load the actual VMWare installation on ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA76H2GT1893&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC-_-pla-_-Home+Gadgets-_-9SIA76H2GT1893&gclid=Cj0KEQjw6tepBRDLqLnxouaY_pkBEiQAPIOiBhMMYTM4GdvDJiNVPUk8iPYY2dXnIYpFBTiov71AQmAaAkSR8P8HAQ&gclsrc=aw.ds ) or a very small SSD. I had a spare SSD laying around that I installed to, but the SD card option is a great way to go since you really only about 4GB of space for the Hypervisor (I think it’s actually less than that by a decent bit). No point in wasting a drive on that if you don’t have to.

Two smaller disks will perform a bit better if your VMs will be doing much on the read/write side of things as well as give you the opportunity to play with managing data stores. I actually use my VMWare box as my backups, but if you have a NAS that supports iSCSI you could set up a small iSCSI target on a NAS to target as well

gabrielle.l · 2015-04-21T19:56:32.000Z

Don’t worry about an SD card for the OS install, just toss it on a USB thumb drive. My production hosts are set up like that, and I have a spare USB drive with a base install already on it. If a USB drive dies, I can restore the host configuration to it and be back in 5-10 minutes. For a test host, that’s all you really need. A full reinstall and reconfigure on a fresh USB wouldn’t take more than 20 minutes if you’ve got nothing complicated to set up, and it’s great practice to see how quickly you can recover from zero.

trelstadtech · 2015-04-21T20:18:47.000Z

Seems like these PowerEdge 2950’s are just a dime a dozen anymore. If you go that route, try to get the III model.

johnwhite · 2015-04-22T00:39:48.000Z

There are all kinds of blog posts on building home labs out there. Tons.

jfrappier · 2015-04-22T10:04:49.000Z

Holo:

Jfrapp:

Here is what I am running - Windows 8.1 with Workstation, capable of running 3x ESXi (virtual) hosts, vCenter, vRealize Automation, DC, SQL, etc. http://www.virtxpert.com/8-core-32gb-ram-360gb-flash-2tb-dual-nic-home-lab-part-list/

Also keep an eye on Woot.com - just the other day they had an HP z600, dual quad-core Xeon’s that could go to 48GB of RAM

Which version of ESXi can you run on that system?

All my ESXi hosts are virtual (so I can blog and lab at the same time) - I have run both 5.5 and 6.0, as well as the new vSphere 6.0 VCSA (beta and GA) without issue.