Tag: HomeLab Update

Whats in my HomeLab (WIMH) – April24

Last update – Jan 21: https://wordpress.com/post/1giantnerd.wordpress.com/1024

Back in August 2022, I decided to consolidate the Dell T3500 & T5400 that I was running as a HomeLab and have a single workstation capable of running the latest ESXi versions, and enough memory and grunt to scale depending on project.

The result:

New PC Parts

Specs:

  • AMD B550 Tomahawk Motherboard
  • AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU (highly recommend)
  • Be quiet! Dark Rock 4 200W CPU Cooler
  • 96GB memory
  • Storage:
    • Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVME drive.
    • Western Digital Blue 2TB SATA drive.
    • Western Digital Blue 3.7TB SATA drive.
    • Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD
    • Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SSD.

Currently Running (Virtualised):

All sitting on VMWare ESXi 6.7

  • W2K19 Domain Controller
  • W2K19 Management Server
  • W2K19 WSUS Server
  • vCenter 6.7 server

To finish configuring:

  • SharePoint 2010 Server
  • SharePoint 2019 Server
  • Development Workstation
  • Azure DevOps Server

HomeLab Future Plans:

Whats in my HomeLab – Jan 21

Last Post: Update on TestLab/HomeLab – Feb 2019


Updates:

  • Added 3x 8GB DDR3 RAM sticks to the PCs.
  • New 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD for ML
  • New Windows Server 2016 Forest
  • New Windows Server 2016 Domain
  • Currently running Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit to ensure that the recommended Group Policy is applied.

Physical Infrastructure:

ESXI1
Dell Precision T3500 Workstation. Intel Xeon W3565 3.2GHz 4 cores per socket. 32GB memory. 1x 400GB datastore and 1x 3TB datastore.
ESXi 5.5 installed.  		ESXI2
Custom Intel Core i7-2600 @ 3.4GHz
4 cores per socket.
24GB memory. 1x 1TB WD Blue HDD. 1x 1TB Samsung Evo 960 ESXi 6.0 installed.
VMWare Workstation
Dell Precision T5400
Intel Xeon E5420 2.50GHz 4 cores per socket.
8GB memory. 2x 1TB datastores. ESXi 5.5 installed.

SAN
HP Microserver Gen8
Intel Celeron G1610T 2.3GHz 4GB memory. 4 bay HDD. 1x 150GB  harddrive for OS.1x 1TB Western Digital Blue used for my software repository.1x 2TB Western Digital  for iSCSI.1x 4TB Western Digital  
Networking 1 x HP Procurve 3400CL-48G Layer 3 switch. 

Future Tasks:

  1. Purchase 4 more DDR3 8GB RAM sticks;
  2. Build the following servers:
    • vCenter 6.0 Appliance;
    • Enterprise Root Certificate Authority;
    • SQL Server 2017;
    • SharePoint 2019 3node Farm;
    • Exchange Server 2015;
  3. Enable Internet Connectivity to the HomeLab;