Note: I have since sold the home lab equipment and am using other shared environments (work lab, cloud, etc.). This page is preserved here for those interested.

I realized early on that people like building home labs for various reasons – education, certifications, fun, testing, or some crazier stuff. As such, I offer a complete list of all hardware kept in the lab for your viewing pleasure. Most items will have links that will take you to the build list or related post.

If you have a question about the lab, feel free to leave a comment below. Keep in mind that hardware models continue to evolve and that some of the build information may be out of date – make sure to look for the post date before ponying up any of your hard earned cash on lab hardware. 🙂

Lab vSphere Hosts

These hosts are used for lab testing and validation. Based on my Sandy Bridge and Haswell builds.

ESX0: Dell T110, Intel X3440 @ 2.5GHz, 32 GB RAM
- Boot from 16GB USB Flash
- 1x Micron 200GB RealSSD P400e (for server-side caching)
- 5 Network Adapaters
  - 1x LAN on Motherboard (LOM)
  - 2x Intel 82547L single port GbE NICs
  - 1x Intel 82571EB dual port GbE NIC
ESX1: Whitebox, Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F, Intel E3-1230 @ 3.2GHz, 32 GB RAM
- Boot from 16GB USB Flash
- 1x Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III SSD (for server-side caching)
- 1x Emulex OCe10102-F dual port 10 GbE PCIe CNA (direct connection to ESX2 for vMotion testing)
- 4 Network Adapters
  - 2x LAN on Motherboard (LOM)
  - 1x Intel 82571EB dual port GbE NIC
ESX2: Whitebox, Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F, Intel E3-1230 @ 3.2GHz, 32 GB RAM
- Boot from 16GB USB Flash
- 1x Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III SSD (for server-side caching)
- 1x Emulex OCe10102-F dual port 10 GbE PCIe CNA (direct connection to ESX1 for vMotion testing)
- 4 Network Adapters
  - 2x LAN on Motherboard (LOM)
  - 1x Intel 82571EB dual port GbE NIC
ESX3: Whitebox, Supermicro MBD-X10SLH-F-O, Intel E3-1231V3 @ 3.4GHz, 32 GB RAM
- Boot from 16GB USB Flash
- 1x SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA III SSD (for server-side caching)
- 6 Network Adapters
  - 2x LAN on Motherboard (LOM)
  - 4x HP NC364T quad port GbE NIC

Dev vSphere Host

I mainly use this server for testing beta builds and other development purposes due to the AMD CPU (can’t mix with my other Intel boxes).

ESXD1: HP N40L MicroServer, AMD Turion II Neo @ 1.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM
- Boot from 16GB USB Flash
- 5 Network Adapters
  - 1x LAN on Motherboard (LOM)
  - 1x Intel 82571EB quad port GbE NIC (copper)

Storage

All of my storage arrays in the lab are NFS attached Synology arrays over various 1 GbE links. Any array with 2 or more NICs are connected to the physical network via a dynamic link aggregation group (LAG) running LACP.

NAS1 (Files): Synology DS411, RAID 5, 4x Western Digital Red Drives @ 3TB each
NAS2 (Lab VMs): Synology DS2411+, RAID 5, 12x Kingston SSDNow V+200 SSD @ 120GB each
NAS3 (Mgmt VMs): Synology DS414slim, RAID 5, 4x SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD @ 256 GB each
NAS4 (Backups): ioSafe 1513+, SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID), 5x Toshiba Drives @ 2TB each
Backup Server VM: Veeam Backup v8 pointed to NAS4 via CIFS.