Lab Setup - will it blow my power circuit ?

[masti]

I am setting up Lab at home so i can prepare for VCP certification.I live in an 800sft appt. This is what i am thinking of having in my home lab setup.Please suggest if this will be good and my Main concern is can i have these many systems at my appt and hope it doesnot BLOW AWAY my power circuit in my appartment, had anyone has similar setup in an appt.

1.ESX1

Dell Poweredge T110

250gb HDD

4gb Ram

2.ESX2

Dell Poweredge T110

250gb HDD

4gb Ram

2.VC

HP Desktop dual core

4gb ram

200gb HDD

Couple of monitors also.

Please suggest, Thanks in Advance.

[AndreTheGiant]

For lab I prefer have a server with a lot of RAM and virtualized ESXi on it, instead of more small servers.

Also workstation could be used, but you need at least 8 GB on the the "host" to make a minimal lab.

Andre

[kianwah]

I am using a similar setup as yours.

1 Dell T110 Server

16GB Ram

4TB HDD (running my VSA)

1 Dell T110-2 Server

16GB Ram

250GB HDD

1 Smart managed Dell 24 ports GE switch (to do trunking)

Total power usage most of the time on my wattmeter is <200W. FYI, my place here is using 230V electricity.

On the whole, I believe my lab setup is good enough to practice everything for VCP and VCAP.

[masti]

Andre,

which server do you suggest, i am not sure which one is good so i can get that.Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks

[weinstein5]

to savepower run VC in a VM on one of the ESXi hosts

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

Dell server of PowerEdge G11 are fine (but to be honest quite all vendor are good).

Intel or AMD could be the same... so check what could be better (but I suggest take at least a 6 core CPU and at least 12 GB of RAM).

With 4 SATA disks an a RAID card with at least 128MB cache you can run well 6-8 VMs

Andre

[wgillick]

Kianwah,

You should not have any problem with 2 small computers. They may be "servers" but they draw only a small amount of power. The power supply is rated for only about 300 watts max, and a review measured the power consumption with 2 hard disks as: 48W minimum to 145W maximum.

source:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/servers/358423/dell-poweredge-t110/specifications

You have a *LOT* of RAM. That is a nice little system. I hope that you keep posting messages about your home lab.

--Will

kianwah wrote:

I am using a similar setup as yours.

1 Dell T110 Server

16GB Ram

4TB HDD (running my VSA)

1 Dell T110-2 Server

16GB Ram

250GB HDD

1 Smart managed Dell 24 ports GE switch (to do trunking)

Total power usage most of the time on my wattmeter is <200W. FYI, my place here is using 230V electricity.

On the whole, I believe my lab setup is good enough to practice everything for VCP and VCAP.

[wgillick]

masti,

I think you will only draw about 600 watts: 140W for each T110, 220W for the desktop, and 100W for the monitors. Should be no problem. But make sure you have a good surge protector, or better a small UPS with surge protection built-in. That is a big investment in configuration time, so give it electrical protection and backup your physical disks as well.

What type of switch and router will you be using in your VCP Lab configuration?

I'm interested in using VLANs to separate different ESXi hosts while using the same physical switch. There is a lot of enterprise-level VMware and Cisco documentation, but I'd like to see working examples for home labs.

My own lab will have 2 x T110, a 2nd-Gen Sandy Bridge i7-2600 for the Management server (running vSphere vCenter Server in a VM of Workstation). Then I plan to use a Cisco-Linksys SGE2000 managed switch for VLANs, and an ASUS RT-N16 gigabit router for DHCP services and connection to the Internet.

I also have a Linksys SRW2024 switch for simpler configurations.

--Will

masti wrote:

I am setting up Lab at home so i can prepare for VCP certification.I live in an 800sft appt. This is what i am thinking of having in my home lab setup.Please suggest if this will be good and my Main concern is can i have these many systems at my appt and hope it doesnot BLOW AWAY my power circuit in my appartment, had anyone has similar setup in an appt.

1.ESX1

Dell Poweredge T110

250gb HDD

4gb Ram

2.ESX2

Dell Poweredge T110

250gb HDD

4gb Ram

2.VC

HP Desktop dual core

4gb ram

200gb HDD

Couple of monitors also.

Please suggest, Thanks in Advance.

[kianwah]

Will,

Yep, I was surprised the servers power usage is really low.

I bought a lot of ram because I run a lot of VMs for other purposes as well. T110 servers are cheap and they support non-ECC ram. However, T110-2 doesn't support :smileycry:! Non-ECC 4GB ram is now quite cheap (around US$34 now in Singapore) so I decided to purchase 16GB.

Do let me know what other information do you want to know about my home lab.

[masti]

Will

My dell Poweredge T310 servers are arriving on tuesday, once i recieve them and start working on them i will update this thread more about how i am doing.

Thanks

Masti

[masti]

So far this is what my setup will be

ESX1:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

ESX2:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

vcenter (this i havent deciced yet to whether use my Mac Book Pro or thinkpad)

ThinKpad T61p

4gb ram

1tb HDD

Storage:

Ix4-400 Iomege NAS storage (4*1TB)

8 Port Netgear Switch - 1gig ethernet

All these are connected to Single Monitor.

[wgillick]

Thank you VERY MUCH, Kianwah!

I did not realize that the Dell T110 small servers can operate with non-ECC DDR3 memory. That is great news. I just confirmed that my T110 (early generation model, not the T110 II) does indeed boot up and load ESXi 4.1 with 2 x 4GB DDR non-ECC from G.Skill. Here are the details:

G.Skill RipJaws Gaming Series

F3-10666CL9S-4GBRL  (non-matched single 4GB)

- or -

F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL (matched pair, 2x4GB)

9-9-9-24 timing

1.5V memory voltage

There are some messages during BIOS startup:

"non-ECC DIMM memory detected"

"missing thermal sensor on DIMM"

But ESXi 4.1 works fine, so far. However, the BIOS still reports the RAM type as "ECC 8GB", so be careful. I would only use this for testing purposes, not for business servers.

Regards,

Will

San Jose, CA

kianwah wrote:

Will,

Yep, I was surprised the servers power usage is really low.

I bought a lot of ram because I run a lot of VMs for other purposes as well. T110 servers are cheap and they support non-ECC ram. However, T110-2 doesn't support :smileycry:! Non-ECC 4GB ram is now quite cheap (around US$34 now in Singapore) so I decided to purchase 16GB.

Do let me know what other information do you want to know about my home lab.

[jamal22066]

Are you guys super rich to be purchasing multiple servers for a home lab?

[wgillick]

Unfortunately, no.

However, I am building a cluster of machines using server-class components that ESXi will recognize as if it were a HCL-listed server. However it's a tradeoff between time and expense: you can build a decent server yourself; but a Dell T110 is less than USD 400. That's an amazing price for a Xeon X3430 with 2GB ECC DDR3. And it just takes 5 minutes to order from Dell, compared to days of buying and building a home system.

Currently, I'm planning for 3 clusters of 2 machines each. Each pair will be similar CPU for vMotion and FT. the most difficult part is the newest Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. Very little documentation about what is actually supported, so...I'm just going to build a Sandy Bridge server to see what happens!

Hey, eBay is great also for used servers and switches. Just watch out for the shipping costs.

--Will

jamal22066 wrote:

Are you guys super rich to be purchasing multiple servers for a home lab?

[kianwah]

Will,

Actually, you can run nested ESX/ESXi on top of your physical machines to meet your requirements. One thing to note is that you can't run 64 bit guest OS on top of the nested ESX/ESXi.However, this will reduce your overall cost!

I also decided to buy T110 because it is on the HCL. I know I can build a whitebox server but it takes up lots of time. Furthermore, T110 pricing is reasonable and it supports non-ECC ram. Of course, this is my personal choice.

BTW, building a VMware lab is so much cheaper than building a Cisco CCIE lab! :smileylaugh:

[wgillick]

Yes, Cisco gear is expensive and highly specific. Whereas an excellent side-benefit to VMware Lab is that it gives you an excuse for buying high-performance graphics workstations to play with after you do your "official" VMware training!

In other words, home-built VMware servers make great gaming machines. In fact, the server motherboard I chose for the ESXi 4.1/5.0 host (Asus P8B WS) supports FOUR PCI-e graphics cards. Now I'll just have to justify buying some extra graphics cards and 24 inch LCD displays to fully test my VMware knowledge!

By the way, I did not do extensive testing on my Dell T110 for non-ECC compatibility. It worked, but the BIOS still thinks it is ECC DRAM. So, I don't how stable the configuration is. For lab testing, I hope that the advanced ESXi features like FT and vMotion will have no problem.

Also, on a different subject, do you have an iSCSI or NFS recommendation for vMotion? I'm looking at either a VMware-certified QNAP TS-239 or Synology DS-1010+ for the external NAS shared storage for my vMotion cluster. This is an unexpected expense--either of these devices costs more than TWO T110 servers!

--Will

kianwah wrote:

Will,

Actually, you can run nested ESX/ESXi on top of your physical machines to meet your requirements. One thing to note is that you can't run 64 bit guest OS on top of the nested ESX/ESXi.However, this will reduce your overall cost!

I also decided to buy T110 because it is on the HCL. I know I can build a whitebox server but it takes up lots of time. Furthermore, T110 pricing is reasonable and it supports non-ECC ram. Of course, this is my personal choice.

BTW, building a VMware lab is so much cheaper than building a Cisco CCIE lab! :smileylaugh:

[masti]

will,

finally i got all my stuff delivered yesterday  and  now i am ready to start building my env and i will let you know how it goes,here is my home lab setup

ESX1:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

ESX2:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

vCenter:

Quad-core Athlon X4
8gb ram
1tb HDD

Storage:

iomega nas ix4-400

2 23" LED monitors.

[wgillick]

Congratulations, masti!

You have a nice Lab-in-Progress. If I may ask, how did you choose your iSCSI or NFS storage solution?

Which specific model of Iomega IX-400 did you get, and did you consider any other models? I'm in the process or choosing either a Synology (expensive, home use, only high-end models are VMware-certified), or QNAP (medium-priced, many models are VMware- and Citrix-certified), and the Iomega CloudStor devices (unknown to me).

What kind of research did you do, and what were the deciding factors in your choice?

Thanks,

--Will

masti wrote:

will,

finally i got all my stuff delivered yesterday  and  now i am ready to start building my env and i will let you know how it goes,here is my home lab setup

ESX1:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

ESX2:

T310

2 250 GB HDD

20GB Ram

dual nic card

No raid controller

vCenter:

Quad-core Athlon X4
8gb ram
1tb HDD

Storage:

iomega nas ix4-400

2 23" LED monitors.

[masti]

Will,

Iomega ix2-200 and Ix4-400 both are VMWare Certified and i have some post of web where people are using it and having no issues.

IX2-200

The Iomega® StorCenter™ ix2-200 Network Storage offers content sharing with advanced security, and is ideal for small and remote offices, workgroups or home networks. Based on enterprise-class EMC® storage technology, the StorCenter ix2-200 provides easy file sharing, iSCSI block access, and multiple RAID configurations for optimized data protection. Business users will appreciate the robust data protection features such as UPS support, print serving, folder quotas, rsync device-to-device replication, and user replaceable drives for business continuity and disaster recovery. The easy-to-use interface provides no-hassle management. Active Directory support and remote access round out the comprehensive business features. The StorCenter ix2-200 supports up to five Axis® IP security cameras for basic video surveillance. Home users benefit from the advanced media features such as the DLNA® certified UPnP® AV Media Server, PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol), torrent download compatibility, Bluetooth® upload, and Cooliris™ slide show plug-in. RSA® BSAFE® encryption for protected installs and upgrades. Supports PC, Mac® and Linux® clients and is VMware® certified for NFS and iSCSI.

These are also litlle expensive as IX2-200 Cloud edition would might cost you between $199-$249, and Ix4-400 cloudstor would cost you  $500 and it has 4 1TB HDD and supports till raid 10 and jbod. Please gothru iomega site and they have very detailed description of product and what it does.

deciding factor was i brought seagate Nas Blackarmour at first and didnt like it really in terms of speed and has some tough time getting it worked and later on when researching i found this and found it very easy to setup and you will find a document on iomega site i believe which explains how you do it or setup with esx.

Masti

[kianwah]

I do not have a dedicated NAS/SAN device for my lab. I was thinking to buy either another T110 server or a NAS/SAN device and I decided that a server is more useful. I am now running HP Lefthand VSA on my server to serve as my shared storage.

I read on the web that the basic features of the VSA are free but advanced features like site replication will require a license. BTW, the VSA is also VMware certified