I’m not that different at all, after a long time, I finally finish building my ESXi home lab, since I did a lot of research to find out every piece of equipment I though why not to share it.
First, as every project, you guys need to understand my business requirements:
- Everything on a single box.
That’s it, I don’t want to pile up MAC Minis, Shuttle PC or HP Microservers.
- Scale up options.
If I’m going to make an investment I want it to last and give me future upgrade options, is it not what ROI is all about?
- I don’t need local storage.
I have an external storage that I will present LUNs to the hosts through an iSCSI connection.
Without further ado here my ESXi Home Lab parts:
Mainly, because it’s certified to run ESXi 5.5 and does not require to inject network drivers into the installer, but also because it comes with some USB ports that I used to install and boot up my ESXi host from. Another cool feature is the IPMI support, that way I don’t need to hook up any monitor to access it, I can access a remote console through the network, nice !!!!
It’s a dual processor MB, supporting up to 512GB of RAM.
That way I can run a few Virtual ESXi hosts and simulate quite a few environments.
This MB has LGA2011 socket type, it’s not the most modern processor available out there, but it’s good enough for my Lab, where I don’t need to run critical and financial applications, allowing me to save some bucks.
So, I got Intel Xeon E5-2603 v2 Quad-Core of 1.8 Ghz.
Something to notice is that this processor does not provide Hyper-Threading, but I’m pretty sure it will make the job done.
Nothing fancy about the heatsink, just pick-up a compatible one.
Memory is the most needed resource on a virtual environment, so for my Lab I picked up some 16GB banks of memory from Black Diamond.
If you want to reach the full MainBoard capacity, memory price will be insane, I don’t need all of that right now, but it gives the future upgrade option.
To feed this baby, you will need a power supply that provides a 24-PIN plus 2x 8-PIN connections, this kind of power supply is a little bit harder to find, but I managed to find out a Zalman ZM850-GVM.
To accommodate all those parts inside I got a Series 2000R Corsair case, that one impressed me by the cooling parts inside, I’m confident it will keep everything cold down there.
Last but not least, I need some network connectivity to access all of that, right ?!?
I decided to get a small network switch with WiFi built in, so I can have all in one again.
The chosen one was a RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN from Mikrotik with 4 Giga bit ports available, more than enough for my needs.
While these pieces might not be the most affordable ones, it fit’s my budget and more important my business requirements ; )
Now it’s up, running and properly branded !!!!
