Home Lab 2016 – Part 1

Having a home lab is every IT enthusiasts dream come true, and now I can finally say that I have fulfilled that dream! I previously was (and currently still am…) using a 1-node “white box” system I had built from a spare gaming machine I had laying around, running on an open-air tech bench from TopDeck. It’s comprised of the following:

1 x ASUS Maximus Gene V motherboard w/ Intel 82579 LOM NIC
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K
1 x ADATA SP600 32GB SSD
1 x Samsung Evo 840 1TB SSD
1 x Seagate 1TB HDD
1 x Intel 82574 (single-port) NIC
1 x Intel 82576 (dual-port) NIC
1 x Corsair HX650 PSU

And even though it runs great, I simply felt it wasn’t enough as I basically wanted to replicate a mini-datacenter for my lab which would help tremendously with my VMware studies and overall VMware knowledge.

So I quickly got to work and embarked on the adventure of creating my new lab. I started off by opening a Feedly account and subscribing to numerous other user and community blogs, reading what others did to create and build/setup their homelabs, and also checked out some youtube channels.

Lot’s of good reads out there…

TinkerTry

Wahl Network

VMware Front Experience

VirtualJad

virtuallyGhetto

Just to name a few…

I also spent the last year+ researching, planning, designing, and purchasing the equipment for my new lab. And since I wanted somewhat of a low power solution (as to not incur outrageous electric bill charges) I settled on SuperMicro’s A1SAi-2750 ATOM SOC (System-on-a-chip) Mini-ITX motherboards. Boy, do these things boast a boatload of features (not getting into specifics as you guys know how to use Google I’m sure…)! Since I also wanted to have them in a rack to replicate a mini-datacenter, I went with a Navepoint 9U rack enclosure. I bought some Sandisk USB’s, some SSD’s & HDD’s (for eventual VSAN setup), and extra NIC’s (for redundancy and best practices), 1U cases, and some Synology NAS devices. Here’s my entire part’s list…