My new Home Lab

Hardware, VMware

my-new-home-lab-logo

Working at VMware provides many fantastic possibilities. One of it is a possibility to use vCloud Director based environment where you can spin up any lab you want (of course with per-user limits 😉 ). This environment has some limits and I decided to purchase new Home Lab.

After long considerations, I decided to buy well known in VMware community Supermicro E300-8D. It has amazing hardware combined with very small chassis.

Main components:
CPU Intel Xeon D-1518 2,2Ghz
Cores/Threads 4 Cores / 8 Threads
Memory 128 GB (4x 32GB) 2133Mhz DDR4 ECC RDIMM
Network 6x 1Gbe (RJ45) + 2x 10Gb (SFP+)
Disks 4x SATA3 1x M.2 – M key 2242/2280/22110 – PCI-E 3.0 x4 1x mSATA (Mini PCI-E) – PCI-E 2.0 x1
Peripheral 2x USB 3.0
Expansion 2x PCI-E 3.0 x8
SATADOM 2x Satadom
VGA 1x VGA
IPMI Yes
Form factor Mini-1U
I’ve decided that for maximum performance I will use all-flash vSAN. Below you will find the list of components I used in my setup:
  • RAM - 4 x 32GB Samsung  DDR4-2133 regECC DIMM CL15
  • ESXi local storage - 32GB Delock SATADOM Module SATA 6Gb/ MLC
  • vSAN:
    • Flash Tier - WD Black 256GB SSD M.2 PCI-Express
    • Capacity Tier - Crucial MX300 2TB SATA

At the moment I am not using any managed switches (I plan to do so in the nearest future) and my lab will be entirely nested. I am in a process of building the environment and after some time I will share my thoughts how this server suits for the home lab.

I certainly recommend to read more about the Supermicro server: