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Home Lab 1.5 – Razor Blade 15

To continue with my Home Lab Journey Series. In my previous post on the subject I covered what I consider my workhorse laptop. Once I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to do what I wanted to do I decided that I needed to look into a different solution. After watching some of my favorite YouTubers it came to my attention that there are laptops that could exceed the 16 GB barrier. So after reviewing some of the videos I came to the conclusion that I should look into Razer. Specifically the Razer Blade 15 as it has the gaming power to allow me to play games (like Skyrim) but it is also portable for me to carry around for presentations.

So after weeks of agonizing over it, I pulled the trigger and finally bought it. At first I was gun shy and definitely had buyers remorse. But after a few days I was able to peel myself away from my HP laptop and make the switch over to the Blade, and my first impression was WOW. It was so fast, powerful, and LOUD. This was all before the 32 GB upgrade which I had to wait for Amazon to deliver. I provided the link to the kit above just encase you were wondering as it was a PiTA to find it.

After the upgrade I then proceeded to install VMware Workstation (I can’t remember the version…. 15 maybe) and then began to deploy vSphere. I was able to deploy VCSA and 3 hosts with 8 GB of RAM each. I was even able to run some (like 2) VMs on those ESXi Hosts. After about 3 months or so I learned that I had more bottle necks that I originally anticipated such as:

  • Memory (32 GB for 3 hosts, vCenter, and Windows 10 was not enough)
  • Network (running off of WiFi, nuff said)
  • Storage (512 GB SSD was not enough)

To combat the network bottleneck I purchased a USB-C dongle with a network connection, and for storage I thought about using a iSCSI NAS but I was not able to convince my Wife to allow me to spend the money at the time. Who am I kidding, I am just cheap and didn’t want to spend the money.

So at this point I am need of additional storage and more memory. That is when I started to think about building my latest creation…. THE BEAST. You can find my parts list here on KIT.CO

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