Home lab setup, part 1

Ah, we all do love our home labs and there are some pretty impressive ones out there. But for my own needs, I can run almost everything nested, so I saw no need to invest “that much” money. Currently my home lab exists out of a single Supermicro E300 9D 8CN8TP node.

Hardware

Some people have asked me how I have set it up. So here is a small blog post about my current setup.

Hardware:
– 1 x Supermicro SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP
– 1 x Sandisk Ultrafit 32GB USB 3.0
– 1 x Samsung PM883 240 GB SATA 2.5″ 1.3DWPD
– 1 x Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB NVMe M2 80mm
– 2 x Crucial 64 GB ECC DDR4-2666 LR-DIMM, ECC
I do have a second 970 EVO drive, but still have to add it to my box.

Configuration

Hardware

There is not much configuration required. After configuring the BIOS settings, make sure to assign an IP to IPMI.

First ESXi

To install the first ESXi host, you have to make a CD-ROM image available to the Supermicro node. This can be done setting up a share on an existing server or on your workstation.
Once done, you will be able to access it from your Supermicro node:

Nested ESXi servers

Because I am using an NVMe drive, I had to add the controller to my nested ESXi servers or my 1TB disk would not be recognized.

For optimal performance I need hardware assistance enabled on my Nested ESXi servers.

The disks

I am using a 240GB SSD disk as well. This disk is used to store the images for the lab but also hosts the application I do not want to run from a nested VSAN. In case my VSAN blows up, I don’t want to reinstall all VM’s from scratch again so I run these from the 240GB disk which is primarily attached to my first ESXi server.

The time needed to start my nested lab

So how long does it take to start my lab and have it up and running?

2 minutes and 30 seconds to boot the hosting ESXi server.
An additional 1 minute and 37 seconds are needed to boot the VM’s on top of this ESXi server:
– vCenter
– AD/DNS/NTP
– 3 Nested ESXi servers
– vROPs

This means I can have my lab up and running in about 3 minutes and 37 seconds. Not bad for a nested lab 🙂

Kim