Many of my daily activities at work now revolve around the idea of a Hybrid Cloud so some of my home lab activities have also followed suit.  I realized it had been a while since I wrote up the particulars of my home lab and I’ve added some equipment so this gives me a good opportunity to show some of the upgrades.

Configuration

The environment consists of four physical ESXi hosts that run most of my virtual machines.  These servers have three nics that handle all of the virtual machine traffic and the NFS Storage traffic to a pair of Synology NAS devices.

A fourth host runs Microsoft Windows on bare metal with 32 GB of RAM, and inside that are three ESXi hosts running inside of VMware Workstation.  These ESXi hosts are used for testing things without affecting my management servers.  For instance, since ESXi is virtual, a quick clone and host profile can build a host very quickly for testing VSAN, spinning up a DR Site or just adding hosts for an endpoint for vRealize Automation.

A Synology DS1815+  is my primary shared storage device with four 4TB spinning disks and a pair of 240GB SSDs as cache.  A second Synology DS1513+ is used for ISOs and virtual machine backups and photos.

A Cisco 5505 ASA is my firewall and it provides Anyconnect VPN Access as well as a Site-Site VPN to Amazon Web Services for a vRealize Automation Endpoint.

Lastly, an HP v1910-24G switch ties everything together with some layer3, and LACP capabilities.

Hybrid Cloud

It’s not a Hybrid Cloud without a Private Cloud, a Public Cloud some Automation and a Catalog.  Also, if you want some nice instructions on setting up vRealize Automation with Amazon Web Services, check out Kendrick Coleman’s blog.  He’s got a great series on the whole setup.

Parts List

ESXi Servers – Quantity 2

• Case:  Lian Li  PC-V351B MicroATX
• PSU: SeaSonic Platinum SS-400FL2 Fanless 400W
• RAM: Kingston 16GB (4 X 8GB) 240-Pinn DDR3 Unbufferred ECC
• Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
• CPU:  Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz
• NICs:  Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 1000Mbps PCI-Express, SuperMicro Dual Port Gigabit Card
• Boot: Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 8GB USB 2.0
• Local SSD: 64 GB Intel SSD

ESXi Server – Quantity 1

• Case: Antec P280 ATX Mid Tower Case
• RAM: Crucial 32GB (2 X 16GB) DDR4
• CPU: Intex Xeon E5-2603V3
• Motherboard: Supermicro X10SRL-F-O
• PSU: EVGA 500W-1 80+

ESXi Server – Quantity 1

• Case: HP Gen8 Microserver
• Storage:   Dual 480GB SSD’s from OCZ

Nested ESXi Host – Quantity 1 (Used for a DR Site, or vRealize Automation Endpoint Cluster)

• Motherboard: Asus M5A97
• CPU: AMD 6200 FX Six Core

Storage Arrays

• Synology Array:  1- Synology DS1513+
• Hard Drives:  Five –  1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives

• Synology Array: 1 – Synology DS1815+
• Hard Drives:
  • Four – 4 TB Western Digital Purple 7200 3.5 inch hard drives
  • Two – 240 GB Kingston SSD Now drives

Networking Equipment

• Layer 3 Switch:  Cisco WS03750G-24T Switch
• Firewall:  Cisco ASA
• Wireless Router:  Dlink Wireless N+ Router