hi guys,
I am planning to finally build my own home lab system. As I live in the flat, have no basement I could place the system, it has to be quiet. Due to that fact I have chosen Gen8 Microserver from HP as a HW platform.
Right now I have 1 x Microserver 8GBram (4x3,5" bays, 1x2,5", Celeron 1610T, 2 x Seagate SV35 1TB, 1 x WD RED 3TB ), 1 x Xeon E3-1220v2.
I have read a lot, used some basic ESXi configurations and did some basic NAS systems in the past, but when advanced things are considered I have little experience and lately less and less time. That is why I have started this thread to ask the community to help me not to make a mistake buying wrong stuff or bulding a solution that I will have to back up on seperate drive and redo again.
VMware approach has two reasons - fan issue of Gen8 and DSM and my need of having additional 2 low duty servers.
A
My base idea for small home lab is to:
0. replace CPU for XEON, option, as I do now want noise and power consumption to go up
1. buy additional WD RED 3TB
2. buy Intel 520 SSD 240GB
3. run ESXi 5.5 from usb/sd
4. store VMs on SSD
5. do RAID-1s from 2x1TB and 2x3TB
6. VM #1 DSM/xpenology7. map 3TB RAID1 using Raw Device Mapping ( in case anything happens, a can always move those disks to virtual or physical DSM env. and recover data)
7. backup VMs and other important data on 2x1TB RAID
B
As I would like to learn more about iSCSI, HA and other advanced features, I wonder if buying another Gen8 (there is promo 350usd, 2020T,4gb RAM, 2 x 1TB NL SATA) and going to:
1. leave 2 x 3TB, install Xeon in 1st gen8 as VMware host and RDM mapped NAS as VM #1
2. put 4 x 1TB to 2nd gen8 and do ZFS RAIDZ network iSCSI storage for other VMs, backups
Questions are:
is A a good way to have home NAS with some options for more environments? what would you change?
is B a viable approach for learning and having home server at the same time? what can done better? changed? I do not mind buing some stuff in order to have some perfect home lab
I am planning to finally build my own home lab system. As I live in the flat, have no basement I could place the system, it has to be quiet. Due to that fact I have chosen Gen8 Microserver from HP as a HW platform.
Right now I have 1 x Microserver 8GBram (4x3,5" bays, 1x2,5", Celeron 1610T, 2 x Seagate SV35 1TB, 1 x WD RED 3TB ), 1 x Xeon E3-1220v2.
I have read a lot, used some basic ESXi configurations and did some basic NAS systems in the past, but when advanced things are considered I have little experience and lately less and less time. That is why I have started this thread to ask the community to help me not to make a mistake buying wrong stuff or bulding a solution that I will have to back up on seperate drive and redo again.
VMware approach has two reasons - fan issue of Gen8 and DSM and my need of having additional 2 low duty servers.
A
My base idea for small home lab is to:
0. replace CPU for XEON, option, as I do now want noise and power consumption to go up
1. buy additional WD RED 3TB
2. buy Intel 520 SSD 240GB
3. run ESXi 5.5 from usb/sd
4. store VMs on SSD
5. do RAID-1s from 2x1TB and 2x3TB
6. VM #1 DSM/xpenology7. map 3TB RAID1 using Raw Device Mapping ( in case anything happens, a can always move those disks to virtual or physical DSM env. and recover data)
7. backup VMs and other important data on 2x1TB RAID
B
As I would like to learn more about iSCSI, HA and other advanced features, I wonder if buying another Gen8 (there is promo 350usd, 2020T,4gb RAM, 2 x 1TB NL SATA) and going to:
1. leave 2 x 3TB, install Xeon in 1st gen8 as VMware host and RDM mapped NAS as VM #1
2. put 4 x 1TB to 2nd gen8 and do ZFS RAIDZ network iSCSI storage for other VMs, backups
Questions are:
is A a good way to have home NAS with some options for more environments? what would you change?
is B a viable approach for learning and having home server at the same time? what can done better? changed? I do not mind buing some stuff in order to have some perfect home lab
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