Home Lab Setup

MinimaniacMinimaniac Registered Users Posts: 2 ■□□□□□□□□□
in Virtualization
Hi all,

Long time lurker who could use a little guidance, I have just start my studies for the VCP550 exam and I'm looking to setup a home lab. A server has just become available to me (for next to nothing) and wondered if it would meet the requirements for a nested setup?

HP Proliant ML350 G6:

2x Xeon E5503
8GB RAM (4x2)
3x 146GB 15K SAS

Obviously more RAM is a must, but is there anything else I'd need to add or change? I was initially looking at purchasing a Dell Precision T5500 before this came up.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :D
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Comments

  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    T5500 is what I am using exclusively.

    New Lab | Open902

    I see you are in the UK. Got a 5% voucher code for bargainhardware.co.uk if you want to order one. But no, I am not affiliated lol. Just love those boxes.

    Suggest some SSDs though
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
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  • joelsfoodjoelsfood Member Posts: 1,027 ■■■■■■□□□□
    I use an HP gen8 microserver and then vmware workstation on my desktop. Most standard servers are too loud for me to have in my office here. The microserver is impressively quiet.
    http://www.joelsccie.com
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  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    joelsfood wrote: »
    I use an HP gen8 microserver and then vmware workstation on my desktop. Most standard servers are too loud for me to have in my office here. The microserver is impressively quiet.

    It's just the 16GB of RAM limitation which is a bit of a downer. Officially even just 8GB
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
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  • joelsfoodjoelsfood Member Posts: 1,027 ■■■■■■□□□□
    16GB in my microserver and 16gb in my desktop gives me more than enough to work with for home lab study. The only thing I'm missing is vsan.
    http://www.joelsccie.com
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  • MinimaniacMinimaniac Registered Users Posts: 2 ■□□□□□□□□□
    where do you think I got the idea from jibbajabba icon_wink.gif I was eyeing one of the t5500 up on ebay when the HP came about. Not sure whether to sell on the HP or spend some money to beef it up.
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  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    Minimaniac wrote: »
    where do you think I got the idea from jibbajabba icon_wink.gif I was eyeing one of the t5500 up on ebay when the HP came about. Not sure whether to sell on the HP or spend some money to beef it up.

    Keep it and then turn it into a NAS ;)
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
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  • EssendonEssendon Member Posts: 4,546 ■■■■■■■■■■
    Apart from the advice already given, I have a very similar setup in a HP DL380 G6 with 72GB RAM and 8 x 146GB disks. If you place your nested VMs carefully, you can easily get by with SAS disks. SSDs are of course nice to have. For a SAN for the nested ESXi hosts, I use Starwind Virtual iSCSI SAN, works like a charm.
    NSX, NSX, more NSX..

    Blog >> http://virtual10.com
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  • kj0kj0 Member Posts: 767
    joelsfood wrote: »
    16GB in my microserver and 16gb in my desktop gives me more than enough to work with for home lab study. The only thing I'm missing is vsan.
    I only have 16Gb on my desktop using VMware Workstation. I then change my VMX file so I can do vSAN and vFlash Caching, etc.
    2017 Goals: VCP6-DCV | VCIX
    Blog: https://readysetvirtual.wordpress.com
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