Category: Home Lab

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Home Lab PowerCLI Starwind Virtual SAN Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 2.0 – Starwind VSAN : The Greatest addition to my Home Lab

At the end of my previous post about The Beast I mentioned about lacking shared storage for my Virtual Hosts. My first thought was to go out and purchase a NAS like a Synology or a QNAP NAS. However I am trying to do this on the cheap and an extra $1200 when figuring in the cost of drives is just not in my budget. Now I am not sure about Synology, but I believe that they are comparable to QNAP in the sense that you can present disks as iSCSI LUN. Which I have done several times in the past and works brilliantly.

So here I am sitting in my office looking at the Beast and I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I can do with all this storage in this one box and how I can share it among my Virtual Hosts. I started looking at FreeNAS and running it as a VM in VMware Workstation and that worked! Until I had a power failure and the virtual disks became corrupted and I could not get them to come back online. Very Frustrating, my search continued.

Anyway, after doing some research I discovered Starwind VSAN. It allows you to take storage on a Windows machine and present it as an iSCSI LUN. I thought this is great and I signed up for a trial which gives you the ability to install it on one host but no graphical interface (it uses PowerShell) but unlimited LUNs. After some quick googling about the syntax I was able t piece together the commands with relative ease. Within a few minutes I was up an running with three new iSCSI LUNs and they were mounted in vCenter.

I mentioned earlier about having issues with FreeNAS and power failures, well ironically we had a power failure but Starwind VSAN came back online without a hitch. I was very impressed with how resilient it was. I have not had the chance to really put it through it’s paces, but so far I think I found a winner.

I plan to s follow up post once I really get off and running to the races so stay tuned for updates.

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Home Lab Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 2.0 – The Beast

Continuing on our series on my Home lab we now move into present day. Well…. a few months ago at least. As I mentioned in my previous post about my Razor Blade 15, I used that as my home lab until I was able to procure parts for my current hyper converged VMware Home Lab.

Below is my part list for The Beast:

Once all the parts came in I managed to get it all hooked up relatively quickly and without issue. I must admit that this is the first time I have ever used a Noctua Cooler, but it is whisper quiet, and nowhere near as expensive as I thought it would be.

So moving away from the hardware I then installed Window 10 and after 4 hours or so of Windows updates I was finally able to install VMware Workstation Pro 15. Well, almost…. it turns out that Virtualization Support was not enabled by default. But I can get into that at a later time. I then built out a Domain Controller (another 4 hours of Windows Updates) and 3 Virtual hosts (no Windows Updates). Once the hosts were built I then deployed a VCSA appliance.

Now I think I have everything I will need to play with VMware Products. That is until I remembered I don’t have Shared Storage for my Virtual hosts. What ever will I do?!

Stay tuned for my next post in this series, especially if you are looking to build a home lab on the cheap.

I hope you found this helpful and if so please share it with your friends, we could really use your support.

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Home Lab Virtualization VMUG VMUG Advantage Vmware

Home Lab Version 1.0 – HP Envy x360

So I mentioned in a previous post about my history with setting up a lab. Now that I was without a place to test things I figured that I really didn’t need one and that I would be totally fine, and I was for a time. But then I joined VMUG and went to a UserCon for the first time. While I was there I got to meet other professionals in the “local” area and we talked about things that we are doing at our respective places of employment and I had the opportunity to see some the the amazing things going on in the industry at the time. I also learned about the VMUG Advantage, but I was not able to drop that kind of money ($200) on something that I was not ready to mess around with it. I did however go back to my work and tell my boss about it. Then I promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward a year later and VMUG USERCon is right around the corner. I am getting ready to ask off of work, and my boss reminded me about the VMUG Advantage and how I has asked to get a subscription. He remembered, he actually remembered!! So I took him up on the offer but I said I wanted to wait until I was there because they offer a discount.

Before going to UserCon my wife got me a New Laptop! It was an HP Envy x360. It came with an Intel i5 Processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB HDD. Not only that, she got me the 16 GB upgrade kit! So I thought to myself that I could make this work. Being an engineer I came up with this whole plan to make it work.

So I go to USERCon and I purchase my first VMUG Advantage Subscription. It was amazing, I couldn’t wait to get home to play with it. the first thing that I did was install and configure VMware Workstation (I can’t remember what version it was at the time) and then I started building out a Domain Controller which I also installed VMware vCenter Server 5 on and even deployed 1 ESXi host. Then…. I ran out of RAM…. damn. I tried several times to make it work but I was just too constricted by my lack of memory and it was Maxed out.

I was really bummed out, but I did not allow that to deter me. I continued to use my laptop as my virtual lab, testing various version of Linux and appliances. It was actually the first laptop I used when I started my Blog back on Blogger.com. To this day it is still my workhorse and I consider it a cornerstone of my 3D Printing operation as I use it for 3D Modeling, Slicing, and controlling my printer. I still call it my work horse.

I am going to continue this series about my home lab adventure because there are some really exciting things ahead. I really want you to get the feeling for where I am coming from.

I hope you find this whole thing helpful and enlightening. If you do please thing about sharing this with your friends and Social media.

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Home Lab Virtualization Vmware

My Journey to my own VMWare Home Lab – The Background

So a while ago I mentioned that I was planning on creating a Hyper Converged VMware Home lab. It has been my dream to have rig at my house that I could play with. Having came from a job where I was a consultant I figured out early that you need a lab to test out configurations and updates before it goes live. I first setup a lab at my previous employer using some old server hardware that we had laying around and was just collecting dust. This was before anyone had ever heard of the word Virtualization. That first lab was built on VMware Infrastructure server 3.5 (yeah I am that old) before that I had been mostly working with VMware workstation and VMware GSX ,you know the one you would install on a Windows server and had an MMC console (Yeah I am that old). That lab became the proof of concept for the company which was the first brick in a very long road to 100% Virtualization. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of my love affair with everything VMware. From that Lab we started to virtualize non critical servers and then next thing we new we had a SAN and 2 brand new Virtual hosts. My Lab stayed in place but eventually I upgraded it to ESX 4 (yep not ESXi as that was witchcraft). I then went to VMware training and got my first VCP. I came back from that and Immediately started to upgrade my lab to ESXi 5.x. With every upgrade I did my little lab grew larger and better and I took a sense of pride in maintaining it as mine.

Unfortunately the Lab that I setup for myself was taken over by another division and then became their DEV environment which meant I didn’t have a place to try out new things. I tried to come up with alternatives which I will cover in a later posts. But you should always try to stay up on the latest and greatest in our industry. If you don’t you will just get left behind.

If you are interested in setting up your own VMware Home lab you should really check out the VMUG Advantage Program here!

For a mere $200 you will get access to THOUSANDS of dollars worth of VMware Software as well as some Cloud Compute and discounts on training and certifications. I have been a member now for 4 years and the resources that I have gained are invaluable. On the subject of VMUG, you should also be sure to check out your local VMUG as that too can be an amazing resource of knowledge.

I am going to end this post here but if you found this post helpful please share with your friends.