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Maniman man

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Home lab datacenter

Hi guys, am planing to set up a home datacenter using ESXI as my hypervisor and would like to know what is best practice/requirements in terms of hardware? The idea is for testing purposes, and would like to be able to run multiple VM's at a time and test their interconnectivity.
I have looked into it, and have identified HP micro server which looks good in terms of performance. However I would like to have you suggestion and expertise. What is the best hardware for disk performance, storage and networking?

Thanks in advance
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gheist
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You need much more than 2-core CPU and 16GB RAM
SSD smashes any rotational disk
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Gheist, I actaully disagree somewhat, I actually use an HP NUC for a 2 server VMware farm... :-), it really depends on what he's putting on there...

So, to further your question, what servers are you planning on spinning up and how many.

Cheers

Alex
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Member_2_231077

Lots of people do use Proliant Microservers for VMware labs. They're a bit limited on RAM but you can always buy two or three of them.
I won't give you my specific HW config for the servers as it's probably a little out of date. But to give me the most accurate representation of my production environment, I purchased two compatible motherboards with the appropriate amount of RAM for my situation and put them in a couple of inexpensive cases. Running the OS from usb flash drives for best speed.  Did NOT buy any storage with the servers, but purchased a Synology NAS box - ethernet enabled -  and populated it with SSD's and am getting great performance. One down side to doing it this way is that you do need to find a VMWare compatible HW list because some pieces/parts don't work well with ESXi.  For example, the motherboard was totally compatible and one NIC was, but the other one wasn't... go figure. I had to add in NIC card that was compatible to get the extra bandwidth.  However, costs can be a lot less than buying some already to go box from HP.
How many VMs do you intend, or wish to be able to support in your home lab?

In my experience, hypervisors are pretty good and managing CPU and Memory between VMs. Disk space/and performance will be the typical point of contention for any small lab.

Another thing to keep in mind, is the power draw servers are gonna have in your house. Servers have higher amperage and power draw, and will significantly increase your monthly power bill.. *Just keep that in mind, when you get your first $500-700. power bill. :-)

You also have to think of cooling. Multiple systems all in 1 room, will increase the temperature in the room, perhaps making that room unsuitable to be in. (this may or may not be an issue for you, depending on how many systems you plan to have in your lab)

Noise - I knew a guy that had 4 Dell R620s in his basement, in a custom built rack.. It was so loud, he could hear the fans whirling up in his 2nd floor bedroom.. Granted he wasn't married and didn't have any kids, but heh.. also something to keep in mind, when your watching the game in the next room, and cant hear squat..
There are Dell C6100 2U 4 node or C1100 1U servers on eBay for a killing right now. That would be a great place to start.
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ASKER

I would like to be able to deploy multiple VM's. Regarding cooling thank you for the tip. I have check the T20server from dell which has a reasonable price and is apparently not noisy. The idea is to have a home lab running an hypervisor ESXI with Vcenter server. Combining citrix xen desktop, openstack, wiindows server 2012 and Linux servers I would like to achieve high performance to my deployed VM's and network security within my domain.
Intel NUC can host 32GB ram...
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Philip Elder
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