70-640 - ESXi - Qnap

Stuppored

Looking to lab both at home and at work using ESXi 5.x

I have a server at home and at work I can use.

Thinking about picking up a QNap TS-212 that supports NFS
QNAP Systems, Inc. ( TS-212 Turbo NAS ) - Quality Network Appliance Provider
so I can take my labs with me to work or home so I can continue labbing.

Anyone agree with this setup? Or is there a cheaper/better way?

Was originally thinking of a USB docking station... or throwing in a hard drive... but that's alot of opening and closing on a daily basis.

Bloogen

I would probably just remote into my home lab before I carried a NAS with me everyday.

Stuppored

I forgot to mention my home internet is a combination of some turbo hub that costs $45/mo for a lousy 3GB and a cell phone tethered @ 6GB/mo.

lol so internet remoting is not an option for someone like me

Bloogen

Maybe do the opposite then. I think for efficiency in labor ad cost it would make sense to keep the lab at work and remote into it from home. Bandwidth on 3G should be adequate for rdp viewing. Unless I am still overestimating your internet. To simplify things more you can use hyper-v as a host server and skip the external storage.

neilperry

Hey so this is pretty much my set up. I have a ESXi whitebox (e3-1230 v2, x9scm-f-o) with a QNAP 219P+ acting as a datastore with drives in RAID1. I had the QNAP way before I even thought about ESXi whitebox but for your setup I think the best would just be an enclosure with a SSD inside. I really think that the QNAP would be overkill for what you need and that an external hard drive would do the deal just fine (plus be cheaper when yuo consider the unit + drives needed).