Updating my home lab part 1 – hardware

Last year I decided it was time to upgrade my home lab but due to time constraints I only got to it somewhere in November last year. Now, when I say home lab it sounds like a big deal, but actually it is not. Up until November my home lab consisted of one Intel NUC (type NUC5i3MYHE) with 16 GB memory. Of course I am running vSphere on top of this Intel NUC and I primarily use this to run my own ‘production’ stuff like Plex, home automation, processing camera feeds, etc. What I wanted to have for a long time was a place where I can install more VMware products on top of vSphere to play around with. I’m talking about NSX and the vRealize suite products, like vRealize Automation and Orchestration. The need of this to do testing and blogging is not that high because I have access to other test environments that I can use for that. Nonetheless I feel the need for running my own environment because, well,  I am also a nerd and I love to fiddle around with this stuff.

Requirements

So before I dive into the new piece of hardware that I bought lets talk requirements, what do I actually need.

• It must be possible to run ESXi on this hardware (preferably native)
• Powerful enough to run the things I want (see above)
• I didn’t want it to be to expensive (hey I’m Dutch remember)
• The hardware must be small in size
• Must allow for extra hard disk or disks (not using shared storage)
• Noise has to be kept to a minimum

So, with these requirements in mind I started looking for something suitable. In the end I had a short list of three options.

The Intel NUC seems to be the logical choice because I already have a NUC, but this lacks in CPU power. The Super Micro is also a very popular system in the wider community, but this is more expensive. Looking at the comparison above I went and got myself the Asrock DeskMini 110 because this scores better in general. This system made the list because a colleague of mine told me  he was already using this and was very satisfied with it.

So, I ended up with ordering the following hardware:

• Asrock DeskMini 110 Barebone
• Intel Core i5-7400 3.5 Ghz 4 cores
• 32 GB of Kingston DDR4
• Samsung EVO 960 NVMe M.2 250 GB
• 2x Samsung EVO 850 SATA III 250 GB

Build phase

When the order finally came in I started unpacking which always feels a bit like Christmas doesn’t it?

After unpacking and checking that everything was there I started by inserting the components. On the bottom of the bracket it is possible to mount two 2.5″ hard disks. The tiny little connection wires are a bit of a challenge to ‘click’ on to the mainboard though, but I got done in the end.

After installing the two Samsung EVO 850’s I started on the processor, NVMe SSD and memory. This was pretty straight forward.

The DeskMini has a slider rail that slides the bracket with all components in the housing itself. This made installing the components very easy. After that I connected everything and it sat there for a few weeks until I found the time to actually install ESXi on it.

A note on vSAN

At first I thought it would be a good idea to use vSAN in my home lab. However, I did not follow through with this. The reason being that the version of vSAN I wanted to use has a pretty heavy memory requirement. Check out this KB to learn all about that. In my case I would lose half of my memory just to vSAN. This is a sacrifice I was not willing to take.

Part 1 conclusion

In part 1 of this multi part blog post I wanted to cover the new hardware that I bought for my home lab. So, together with this new addition I now have two different systems running in my home lab. Next I had to come up with a way of using this hardware as efficiently as possible. I will go into more depth on this in part 2, explaining how I setup everything physically and logically and how I am using nested ESXi hosts as resource cluster for vRealize Automation.