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Homelab v2 – Part 1

May 19, 2017 / David / 0 Comments

Out with the old

My previous homelab, although functional was starting to hit the limits of 32GB of RAM, particularly when running vCenter, vSAN, NSX, etc concurrently.

A family member had use for my old lab so I decided to sell it and get a replacement whitebox.

Requirements

Quiet – As this would live in my office and powered on pretty much 24/7 it need a silent running machine
Power efficient – I’d rather not rack up the electric bill.
64GB Ram Support

Nice to have

10GbE
IPMI / Remote Access
Mini-ITX

Order List

I’ve had a interest in the Xeon-D boards for quite some time, the low power footprint, SRV-IO support, integrated 10GbE, IPMI and 128GB RAM support make it an attractive offering. I spotted a good deal and decided to take the plunge on a Supermicro X10SDV-4C+-TLN4F

As for a complete list:

Motherboard – Supermicro X10SDV-4C+-TLN4F

RAM – 64GB (4x16GB) ADATA DDR4

Case – TBC, undecided between a supermicro 1U case or a standard desktop ITX case

Network – Existing gigabit switch. 10GbE Switches are still quite expensive, but it’s nice to have future compatibility on the motherboard for it.

I’ve yet to take delivery of all the components, part 2 will include assembly.

VCAP6 Deploy Passed

May 6, 2017 / David / 1 Comment

Now I can rest…

I decided at around mid December to make passing the VCAP6 DCV Deploy exam a target. Today I can tick that objective off. As I have previously passed the VCAP5-DCD exam this should entitle me to the VCIX-DCV certification, but I may need to wait a bit for that.

My Experience

Precisely this time last year I passed the VCAP5-DCD exam. By cheer coincidence I picked exactly 365 days later to do the deploy exam on v6. I was quite nervous as I’ve never done a deploy VMware lab exam before. The lab itself was reasonably well laid out but the response times and general feel of the environment was a bit sluggish, but then again my home lab resides on SSD storage so perhaps I’m used to a snappy interface.

Tips based on my own prep

The study guide from vJenner is an absolute goldmine : http://www.vjenner.com/vcap6-dcv-deployment-study-guide/.
As with all VMware exams the blueprint is your main reference. If you’re comfortable with most of the objectives you should be good to go.
- Additionally, there is a lot to cover. Naturally like myself you’re most likely going to have weak and strong areas. Don’t get too hung of up on (for example) nailing to commit the entire esxcli CLI namespace to memory.
If you’re finding it difficult to fully remember esxcli commands in their entirety remember there’s –help and –example flags.
use a VMware HOL (Hands on Lab) to get acquainted with the UI

Good Luck!

VMW-LGO-CERT-ADV-PRO-6-DATA-CTR-VIRT-DEPLOY-K

My Nested NSX Home Lab

January 15, 2017 / David / 5 Comments

With the ever growing popularity of SDDC solutions I’ve decided to invest some time in learning VMware NSX and sit the VCP6-NV Exam. For this I’ve re-purposed my existing homelab and configured it for NSX. I have a fairly simple setup consisting of a single whitebox “server” that will accommodate nested ESXi hypervisors and a HP Microserver acting as a iSCSI target.

Whitebox specs:

Motherboard: MSI B85M-E45 Socket 1150

CPU: Intel Core i7 4785T 35W TDP

RAM: 32GB Corsair DDR3 Vengeance

PSU: 300W be quiet! 80plus bronze

Case: Thermaltake Core v21 Micro ATX

Switch: 8 Port Netgear GS 108-T Smart Switch

Cooler: Akasa AK-CC7108EP01

NAS/SAN: HP Microserver N54L , 12GB Ram, 480GB SSD, 500GB mechanical.

ESXi is installed on the physical host with additional ESXi VM’s being created so I can play around with DRS/HA features too. The end result looks like this:

NSXLAB

From a networking perspective I have separate port groups on my physical host for Management, VM, iSCSI, vMotion etc. My nested ESXi hosts have vNIC’s in these port groups. Due to the nature of nesting ESXi hosts for this to work promiscuous mode has to be enabled on the port groups on the phyiscal host for this to work (management doubles as VXLAN Transport)

vSwitch

The actual installation of NSX is already well covered but this covers the basics for what I needed to do.

Virtual Thoughts