Kristof's virtual life

Till today I was able to run a basic setup on my developer workstation with 64GB of RAM. But once you want to start working with several products as vSphere, vRA & NSX it just doesn’t cut it anymore.

So I finally decided to invest in a real homelab for further experimenting. However, the only problem that I had, was my tiny budget 🙂 . I started looking at the different homelabs on the VMware community that you can find on github (link). Here I filtered out the homelabs with a budget of max 2K.

After checking them all, there was one that appealed to me, and that was the one of “vmexplorer”. Now let me explain why I’ve chosen that one specifically. Due to my low budget, I can only afford 1 host. So if you can use a motherboard with a dual-cpu you just have more cores to spend for your workloads.

But with reading his blog it was clear that like in any situation you need to create your requirements. So what do you want to run in your environment simultaneously?

Requirements

My requirements were to play around with vSphere 7, vRA & NSX. And because I was still supporting a vRA 7 environment I also added these into my requirements. However there’s no need to have both vRA versions running in my case. You can certainly consolidate all these Windows servers on 1 or 2 servers. So there is certainly a possibility to lower your footprint for vRA 7, certainly in a lab environment.

vRA 7 hardware requirements

Appliance	vCPU	Memory	Disk Space
vRealize Automation Appliance	4	18GB	140GB
Infrastructure Core Server	4	8GB	40GB
Infrastructure Web Server	2	8GB	40GB
Infrastructure Manager Server	2	8GB	40GB
Infrastructure Web/Manager Server	2	8GB	40GB
Infrastructure DEM Server	2	8GB	40GB
Infrastructure Agent Server	2	8GB	40GB
MSSQL Database Server	2	8GB	40GB
vRealize Business for Cloud Appliance	2	8GB	50GB

vRA 8 hardware requirements

Appliance	vCPU	Memory	Disk Space
vRealize Lifecycle Manager	2	6GB	33GB
VMware Identity Manager	2	6GB	60GB
vRealize Automation	8	32GB	7GB

NSX Data Center hardware requirements

Appliance	vCPU	Memory	Disk Space
NSX Manager	4	16GB	60GB
NSX Controller	4	4GB	28GB
NSX Edge	1	512MB	1GB

I added SRM in the requirements because if needed I can always virtualize an ESX to play around with SRM.

Site Recovery Manager hardware requirements

Appliance	vCPU	Memory	Disk Space
SRM Light	2	8GB	16GB

Bill of materials

Because I live in Europe the motherboard was more expensive. During my search on the web, I’ve found them cheaper in the United States, but I wasn’t able to find one seller that shipped them to Europe.

In my bill of materials you will some items that are striked through. This is because I made an intial mistake when I’ve ordered my components. It’s important to check all your needs and go through the specs of your motherboard.

• For your power supply it’s important that you have 2 EPS connectors (4 + 4) for the dual CPU’s.
• For the CPU coolers it’s important that the cooler supports the LGA2011 Narrow ILM version.

Hardware	Type	Price	Website
Mobo	Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD	267,75€	Ebay.be
RAM	256GB : 4 x Hynix 64GB PC3-12800L 240Pin DDR3-1600MHz LRDIMM ECC RAM	412,78€	Ebay.com
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2650V2 LGA 2011	62,48€	Ebay.com
Case	DEEPCOOL Matrexx 55 Mesh	48,90€	Tones.be
Power	SEASONIC 650W S12III ATX 80+ Bronze	70,35€	Tones.be
Power	MSI 650W MPG A650GF ATX 80+ Gold Modular	119,95€	Tones.be
CPU cooler	2 x Scythe Mugen 5 PCGH Edition	115,90€	Tones.be
CPU cooler	2 x Noctua NH-U9DX i4	119,80€	Amazon.de
HD	KINGSTON 120GB	21,64€	Tones.be
HD	SAMSUNG 2000GB	209,99€	Tones.be
Switch	Netgear GC110	29,95€	iBood
Total cost		1.293,24€

Assembling

Getting the motherboard in it’s case. Make sure that you check the correct position of the standoffs compared to the mounting holes. I had to add 3 extra standoffs to support the E-ATX board and then I had to move the 3 center standoffs to match the mounting holes.

Here you can see my initial install process to check if there were no hardware issues. And then on the right the final result of my homelab in it’s case 😀

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Closing off

I’m SUPER happy that I finally bought my own hardware for my homelab. And boy I must say it’s a SUPER quiet lab. I don’t even hear it and it’s just standing on my desk. An added value during the winter is that my room is now extra warm because of the heat 😀 Hopefully I’ll still be positive during the summer.