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:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE X399 AORUS PRO 
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S TR4-SP3
• VM Storage: Toshiba N300 6TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
• Memory: (128 GB) Viper Steel Series DDR4 32GB
• Boot and SD Storage: Samsung (MZ-V7E1T0BW) 970 EVO SSD 1TB
• Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G+, 80 Plus Gold
• Video Card: ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 
• Case: Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-DELTA RGB Mid-Tower ATX Gaming Case, Tempered Glass

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.