Part 1: Planning My Home Lab
I have been itching for years to set up a proper home lab environment. Ever since I returned from Korea in early 2000, and really became enamored with computing, I have been hoarding materials and building small server towers that were completely maxed out to their full capabilities and overclocked to the point of near CPU meltdown. They never really did anything but they did teach me lots about A+ level computer repair, maintenance and good old troubleshooting which to this day, has made me a world class cyber technician. Nowadays, I prefer to virtualize as much as I can but I still recognize that I still need some bare metal to host my instances; with virtualization, containerization and microservices, I can scale a seemingly large enterprise network in a notionally small space, so with that, I began my quest to build out a home lab that was reasonably affordable and still had enough horsepower to provide me some significant real-estate to play in.
First, I needed to decide how much I was going to spend on this monstrosity. My wife has always been very patient with my hobby and I didn’t want to go hog wild and spend so much that the next trip I made was to a divorce lawyer, so I set a reasonable budget with some flexibility so I could shift around if I needed extra parts or didn’t account for any unplanned expenses. Most of my purchases were going to be refurbished parts so I was not overly concerned about blowing the bank account and I knew that I could scale over time if I needed to, so I set what I wanted/needed at a bare minimum to get started:
- Dell Server Chassis, Dual CPU, Bare Bones (3 each)
- Min: 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon, 6 Cores (6 each)
- Min: 16 GB DDR4 ECC SDRAM (12 each)
- Min: 500GB SSD (3 each)
- Min: 500GB SAS (21 each)
- 1Gb 24 Port Cisco Switch (1 each)
- 1Gb Cisco Router (1 each)
- Cooling fan (1 each)
- UPS Capable of handling all of the physical equipment
- VMWare VSphere, 2 CPU (4 each)
- VMWare VCenter Server (1 Each)
- Windows Server 2016 (1 Each)
- 42U Server Rack
- Lots of Cat-6 Ethernet cable
I started to shop for parts and actually found some very reasonably priced items on some refurbished websites. My go-to site became ServerSupply.com. They had great prices with warranties and good return policies. I picked up my server chassis (Dell R710s), RAM, CPUs and UPS from there all for under $3000.00. I had one server that came with a bad motherboard. I contacted them about it and they immediately sent me a full replacement server with no questions asked; I was very impressed with the customer service.
Next, I found some used cisco equipment on Facebook marketplace for $50.00. I ended up picking up 2 routers, 4 switches and some other components that I haven’t fully figured out yet, but I know one is a VOIP switch and 2 are ASA firewalls. All in all, I scooped up about $800.00 in networking equipment for pennies on the dollar.
I also added a TPLink 10 Gbps 8 port ethernet switch to my backplane to handle all of my vSAN and vMotion traffic; that way I can maximize my HA cluster throughput and save valuable time when I need to rebalance the vSAN or DRS. I have some spare ports that I may try to leverage for Software Defined Networking via NSX-T, but that will be a whole other adventure.
The fan, I picked up at Costco; it was an industrial cooling fan that does not have AC, but it blows hard!
As far as the software goes, I have collected software over the years as a college student, beta tester and developer which has granted me access to lots of free licenses to enterprise level software. I highly recommend that if you pursue setting up a home lab, that you sign up for development accounts with VMWare, RedHat, Microsoft and others in order to take advantage of those developmental licenses. They will save you thousands of dollars in licensing fees.
Finally, I had to address the server rack. I had already spent about $4500.00 total on all of the equipment thus far and a decent rack was going to cost another $400.00 at a minimum. As well, I had to consider where I was going to store said rack; so instead, I looked online at some woodworking rack build plans and I decided to build one myself using this plan. The cost of raw materials was only about $40.00 and a day’s worth of work.
It turned out pretty good, even though the casters need to be replaced; they were rated to support 300 pounds collectively but my total rack weight is probably about 375lbs or more.
In my next blog, I’ll discuss configuring all of the equipment and setting everything up. It was a fun adventure with a few pitfalls and lessons learned but mostly great successes. Stay tuned…
