My Lab Environment

I’ve changed my lab around a bit again , I’ve had 2 Dell SC440′s for a number of years as below but recently they have been showing their age so I’ve now retired those off to the multi-coloured auction site on the webz! I’ve built a whitebox pc based on a gigabyte motherboard with an AMD Phenom II X6 processor and 16GB of crucial DDR3 memory. I found when looking around that I could buy 16GB of DDR3 for the same price as 4GB of memory for my SC440′s so that pushed me along the whitebox route.

The host os is loaded on a standard 500GB sata2 disk and the vsphere lab vm’s are provisioned on a OCZ vertex 120GB SSD (which is so fast you can reboot an ESXi vm and the vsphere client doesn’t realise the loss in connectivity most of the time) Thanks to Simon @techhead for pointing out a deal on the drive.

Windows 7 is the host OS and vmware Workstation 8 provides the type 2 hypervisor (courtesy of vmware for passing the VCP5 Exam)

The vSphere lab roughly consists of the below (all vm’s within workstation8)

1x vCenter5 VM

1x Starwind vm for iscsi duties(server 2008 R2)

3x ESXi5 vm’s

1x physical Iomega Ix2-200 Storcenter NAS box for NFS and ISO storage.

Workstation is actually proving to be far better for my needs than the old physical servers I had as I can create far more complex networking scenarios than I ever could have done on within the SC440s.

Archived

My home lab has recently been updated quite a bit, I still have my 2 Dell SC440′s. However I have added an Iomega Storcenter ix2-200 nas box to my setup and also have changed my prefered hypervisor from vmware esxi4 to citrix xenserver 5.6. This allows me greater control over my 2 hosts as xenserver free edition allows you to create a pool of servers and also gives you Xenmotion (Citrix’s version of vMotion in the free edition) and also cloning. The Iomega storage device is Iscsi enabled so I can use it as a target for my Hosts which obviously is required for xen and vMotion to work correctly.

I’m actually pretty pleased with xenserver as a hypervisor it seems pretty mature and whilst some things are not quite as neat as vmwares hypervisor its a very solid solution. I started looking at the other hypervisors when the whole vSphere5 #vTax thing erupted causing me to look around at the competition for my role.

So at the moment my setup consists of 2 dell SC440′s acting as the hypervisor host that are both connected to the Iomega ix2 by iscsi all fed through a gigabit Netgear GS605, and then uplinked to my router. I’ve maxed out the switch so I might have to upgrade that in the not too distant future.

This has been archived

My lab is rather modest at the moment. It consists of 2 Dell PowerEdge sc440 server’s with an intel xeon processor and 6GB’s of ram. Both the servers currently run ESXi with a mix of guests including the usual  MS 2003, 2008, and freenas (media) and openfiler Iscsi targets. The servers are powerful enough to run about 8vm’s (2k3 and xp ones) without any notable drop in performance).

All the Microsoft licences come from either evaluation versions (if I wont need the server for very long) or my technet direct subscription (absolutely essential). The Citrix licence comes from the developer edition of Xenapp which gives you a year with a 2 user allowance.

One of the servers until recently had XP installed on the bare metal which allowed me to install VMware workstation for VCP studying now I’ve passed that I have installed ESXI back onto it to aid me with whatever I choose next.

Generally I find the servers very good although I do believe that the HP ML115′s would have been better but I missed out on the extrodinarily cheap HP box bunfight that occured sometime ago.