Since starting my new job at VMware I thought it would be a good idea to beef up my home lab a bit so I can test as much as possible at home. My lab had previously contained the following:
2 x Shuttle XH61V systems with 12 GB RAM and a dual core Celeron CPU
1 x NetGear ReadyNAS 2100 storage system with 4 x 2 TB hard drives
Storage was provided via iSCSI and NFS from the ReadyNAS
The hypervisor was a custom spin of VMware ESXi 5.5 with vCenter 5.5u1. The custom spin of ESXi is needed to address ESXi 5.5 lacking a NIC driver needed for the XH61V. Ryan Birk has a great step-by-step guide to building the ISO if you are so inclined.
The lab was working well but RAM was tight and I wanted some more cores. I could have bumped the RAM in each host to 16 GB and upgraded the CPU to an i5 or i7 but I thought it would be best to add another host as well as bump the RAM up.
The lab is now running the following:
3 x Shuttle XH61V systems with 16 GB RAM and a dual core Celeron CPU
1 x NetGear storage system with 4 x 2 TB hard drives
Storage is still provided via iSCSI and NFS from the ReadyNAS
I have also installed a single 2.5″ hard drive in each host and will be adding a 32 GB mSATA SSD to each host so I can build out a VSAN config as well. The cluster is working perfectly right now and has not had a single issue.
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