Virtualisation: Home Lab Update

Home lab storage

I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place.

Storage

I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options on any testing I’m performing.  The storage is broken down as follows:

• DroboPro – 8.4TB of raw storage across 7 disks (nearly fully populated) – iSCSI
• Iomega ix4 – 2x 4TB of raw storage across 4 disks – iSCSI & NAS
• CLARiiON – 2.2TB of raw storage across 15 disks – Fibre Channel

This gives me 18.6TB of raw capacity.  One of the ix4 devices is production, running my VMs on ESX, the other is for testing performance and configurations but will ultimately form my remote backup solution. 

Servers

Server Rack

My main server is an Intel Based, 2 CPU, 8 core custom-build machine with 16GB of RAM.  It runs ESXi 4.0 and has access to all storage resources as well as another 1.6TB of internal storage.  This machine runs all my production and test virtual machines.  A second server runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (upgraded this week).  This is my Hyper-V test server.  It has a single 500GB drive and access to all storage resources, including fibre channel via an Emulex LP12000 HBA card.

I also have two other smaller servers that act as test machines in various scenarios, one of which is currently acting as an OPEN-E server (the subject of a future post).

Fabric

The fabric in my test lab is provided by a number of McDATA 3232 switches.  Although they are servicable, they are looking old now, so I’m looking to acquire a Cisco MDS switch to add to these for some time in the future.  Having said that, the McDATA switches do just work and are a perfect example of technology that doesn’t need to be replaced.

My setup allows me to test and experiment with a wide range of virtualisation scenarios.  Obviously I’m reliant on free ESXi software so I can’t always test the features I’d like such as vMotion unless I continually re-install ESXi.  However it does give me an opportunity to understand the operational issues of vSphere.

Next on the testing agenda is looking at Hyper-V.  The Windows 2008 Hyper-V server I have in place has been upgraded to R2 and I’ve started to create a number of test environments, including testing with DroboPro.

Stay tuned for more updates!

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