I’ve outgrown my current home lab setup. The desire and passion I have to go deeper in VMware technology I had to expand. Passion to learn has no boundaries or limitations by nature but there’s a budget and cost that tends to stand in the way.  But I generally default to, if there’s a will there’s a way.

Current Home Lab (Phase 1):

• 3 Intel NUC’s Skull Canyon (NUC6i7KYK)
  • i7 Processors
  • 512 & 256 NVMe storage
  • 32GB RAM

Currently running following:

• Multiple Domain Controllers (ADDS)
• Exchange Servers
• Key Management System (KMS)
• VMware NSX
  • Micro-segmentation
  • Edge Services Gateways
  • Load Balancers
• VMware Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vSphere Replication
• vCenter (VCSA) + VCHA
• VMware Network Insight
• VMware vRealize Log Insight
• VMware vRealize Operations
• Various other OS’s (Client Windows, Linux Web Servers etc..)

Everything is great and runs perfectly but there’s a problem. That problem was extending beyond a single cluster and/or ‘site/location’.

Purchased an additional 3 more Intel NUC Skull Canyons with the same specs as Phase 1.

Home Lab (Phase 2):

• Compute: 62 Ghz
• Memory: 192 GB
• Storage: 5 TB

Storage is backed by an all SSD Synology.

Public Primary (Prod) to Secondary (DR) is handled by Cisco ASA appliances with statics.

Networking: Force10 (Dell) 48-port 1/10GB switches.

Objectives: 

• Extend layer 2 boundaries for site failover. – NSX
  • Site Recovery Manager for DR failover testing and orchestration.
  • vSphere Replication for non-array replication.
  • VDI deployment
  • vRealize Automation

Bill of Materials: For your own NUC cluster:

Intel NUC – NUC6i7KYK

Memory – Crucial 32GB Kit (Buy this memory or you might encounter issues)

Samsung 960 EVO/Pro Series NVMe M.2 (Storage is dependent if you want to run the NUCs in a vSAN environment or not. If shared storage is going to be used then local storage isn’t needed).

StarTech USB 3.0 Ethernet LAN Adapter This allows the ability to use a USB port to ethernet for storage or anything else. Highly recommended. Custom driver built and install instruction below:

William Lam at VMware built this driver which works flawlessly. Link: StarTech USB 3.0 to Ethernet for NUC

This is a very short run down of the home lab update. Stay tuned to the future blog post series and how we achieve this design outside of production.

Thanks for reading!