Lab on The IT Hollow

Harvester and IPMI Integration

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:58:17 +0000

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important.

The Harvester Home Lab - VMs and Containers

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:44:16 +0000

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail.

2021 Home Lab

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 15:14:45 +0000

Time for an update on the home lab. 2020 meant spending a lot of time at home and there were plenty of opportunities to tinker around with the home lab. I did purchase some new hardware, and did plenty of reconfiguring so here’s the 2021 version of my home lab in case anyone is interested.

Rack

The rack is custom made and been in use for a while now. My lab sits in the basement on a concrete floor. So I built a wooden set of shelves on casters so I could roll it around if it was in the way. I place the UPS on the shelf so that I can unplug the power to move the lab. As long as I have a long enough Internet cable, I can wheel my lab around for as long as the UPS holds on. On one side I put a whiteboard so I could draw something out if I was stuck. I don’t use it that often, but I like that it covers the side of the rack.

2020 Home Lab

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 16:51:23 +0000

Its 2020 and I’ve had plenty of time at home due to the social distancing and global pandemic going on. I’ve also been putting off purchasing any new home gear, thinking to myself that maybe the cloud only model will be my next lab, but it isn’t yet. Due to the work I’ve been doing with vSphere 7 and Kubernetes clusters, I couldn’t avoid updating my hardware any longer. Here’s the updated home lab for any enthusiasts.

Whats in the Lab for 2017?

Mon, 01 May 2017 14:02:48 +0000

To me, a home lab is an important piece of my ongoing education. It’s one thing to watch videos and take classes but getting some time to build, configure or run solutions in your own setting is an invaluable resource. In my life, I’ve never learned anything REALLY well until I’ve had to operate and troubleshoot it. Having a mission critical system crash and having to learn how to fix it is a great way to learn things very quickly but also pretty painful. So to me, a home lab is critical.

Ubiquiti in the Lab

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:05:42 +0000

It’s one of those “first world problems” where you have either not enough wireless coverage at home, or you’re getting too much interference from the neighbors to have satisfactory wireless coverage.

I had an Linksys AC3200 providing all of my house’s wireless connectivity and for the most part, it did a good job. I have about twenty-five devices connected to it through wireless and all four of the 1Gbps network jacks filled up as well. Occasionally I found that I needed to restart the router but it was pretty good, no real complaints. However I did have it located in my office which is at the opposite side of my house from my bedroom, which meant some sketchy wireless over the 5Ghz band if working from bed which I did often. I’d have to switch over to the 2.4GHz band and then I was getting interference from neighbors. It was time to try something else. OK sure, I could’ve moved the router closer to the middle of the house, but let’s over engineer the solution instead right?

Custom Made Computer Lab Rack

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 14:23:35 +0000

I had some extra materials left over from a home improvement project I had been working on and decided to put them to use on a custom made rack for my lab. My requirements for the rack design were pretty simple.

Hold my equipment
Make it somewhat portable
Needed to be able to work on the equipment from both the front and the back side
Able to discretely hide cabling

Here is what I came up with. It’s a set of three shelves attached to four posts. The posts in the back are longer because I thought I might add some additional patch paneling in the back. The rack is built on top of casters so I can roll the lab to a different area of my basement if I need to move it’s location for some reason.

Home Lab Expenses

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 15:00:32 +0000

Home Labs aren’t cheap. Depending on what you want to do with your lab, they can even be really expensive. If you’re looking at building one for yourself, you should take some time to determine what you want to get out of it. I’ve found that having a home lab is an incredibly valuable asset to my continuing education and I attribute much of my career success to having one. To me, it’s as essential tool for my career, but for others its a money pit.

Hollow Lab 2015 - Baby Dragon Hybrid Cloud

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 14:00:51 +0000

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.

Cloning Nested ESXi in Workstation

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:41:04 +0000

I recently had to rebuild part of my home lab due to a very poor decision to host all of my nested ESXi hosts on a single SSD. Kids, Do NOT do that at home! Obviously this is a lab and budget was a constraint, but it was a bummer when my SSD finally failed. It might be useful to review some steps used to build ESXi Servers inside VMware Workstation. Especially since Workstation 10 can clone ESXi which makes things much quicker.

Add SSDs to HP Microserver

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 15:21:26 +0000

My brand new shiny HP Microserver arrived in the mail and I was excited to try it out. I had four 480GB OCZ SSDs to add to this baby server and wanted to get it up and running. Unfortunately, the HP Microserver is built for 3.5 inch drives. Luckily I found great solution.

Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket.

Attach your 2.5 inch SSD to this bracket, then attach the bracket to the HP MicroServer Drive Trays and you’re good to go.

Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:39 +0000

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts.

Synology DS411slim Review

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 13:57:10 +0000

I recently purchased a Synology DS411slim NAS device for my home lab in order to quiet down my rack and start using up less power. Obviously to accomplish this I would need to fill it up with Solid State drives which have the added benefit of a large number of IOPS :)

I screwed my four 480GB OCZ SSD’s into the drive cages and slipped them into the chassis. Really my only con for this device was getting the drives into the chassis. I did have to do a bit of wiggling to get them seated correctly.

Baby Dragon Home Lab

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:00:41 +0000

My configuration is listed below if anyone is interested in the details.

Similar designs have been done before by both Chris Wahl @Chriswahl and prior to that by Phillip Jaenke @RootWyrm who called them " Baby Dragons". I used their base config and made a few tweaks of my own based on pricing, part availability etc.

Part 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

Flex Server - Quantity 1 (Used for a Hyper-V server, VSA or 3rd ESXi Host)

Case: HP Gen8 Microserver
Storage: 4 480GB SSD’s from OCZ

Storage Array

Synology Array: 1- Synology DS1513+
Hard Drives: 5 1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives

Networking Equipment

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

ESXi Server Notes:

I’m not going to lie, when I saw these cases on Chris Wahl’s lab and had to have them. They look crazy sharp and I love the pull out Motherboard mounting option. There are other components in common but I have a feeling these were copied because of a similar taste for components and budget rather than lust! :)