The home lab – general

Finally I decided to create a decent home lab. Not only to run some tests but most of all to be able to show all of you in the conferences that I will attend reliable demo’s. You know what happens when you want to demo on a over-used network …

I’m not entirely sure if I will keep it running from home or if I will drop it somewhere in a hosting facility but for now it will stay very close to me 🙂
Components:
2 x Server:

• HP ML350p Gen8 Intel E5-2603
• HP 1Gb Ethernet 4-port 331i
  Adapter
• HP Smart Array P420i
  Controller
• Eight (8) Hot-Plug (SFF)
  SAS/SATA Drive Bays
• Seven (7) HDD blanks 
• Ten (10) USB ports
• Eight (8) PCIe 3.0 slots
  (3×16, 1×8, 4×4), One (1) PCIe 2.0 slot (1×4)
• 4 x 16GB 2Rx4 PC3L-10600R-9 Kit

HP V1410-16G Switch – Switch – 16 x 10/100/1000 – desktop. THese are very cheap switches. You will notice that this is a stron contrast with the CNA’s … I KNOW! But I wasn’t ready to buy so expensive switches that would fully support them. Therefore I will try to use the CNA’s as Peer2Peer direct attached ones and use them only as a 10GbE Storage backend. This should make it possible for me to run some different VSA’s or even a Nexenta Cluster.

SAN:
Drobo B1200i; LINK
In this model of the Drobo we have 6x2TB disks but also 3x200GB SSDs. The SSDs are OCZ Talos MLC drives. I blogged about Drobo before with how the B1200i actually works. I am very happy that I will finally be able to test this myself in a real use case.


The Plan: blogposts will follow

1. Install ESXi 5.1 on first server
2. Build infra basics incl vCenter and distributed switches
3. Build Auto-Deploy for the Lab
4. Build nested lab for Server 2012 Hyper-V
5. Build fake production environment – the DEMO lab incl AD, Exch, SQL, …
6. Throw all Veeam products at it!