I am documenting and sharing my home lab setup here. This is aimed to help anyone out there to get started on building their lab with white box components.
My first host was purchased in June 2012, and expanded to three in March 2013. As much as possible, I try to keep the configurations consistent.
My home lab consists primarily of white box ESXi hosts. Initially there were 2 of them, and 2 shared storage. The primary storage was Nexenta, and the secondary is a Synology DS412+ NAS. Connectivity is enabled by a pair of DLink Gigabit switches. There’s a 4 port Trendnet KVM to share the monitor, keyboard and mouse.
When vSAN went GA several years ago the Nexenta storage was replaced with a 3rd ESXi host.
Let’s start with the hardware configuration.
ESXi Hosts – the 2 white boxes and a 3rd in black (not showing)
- Main board – ASUS P8H77-M
- Processor – Intel Core i5-3550 3.3GHz & Intel Core i5-3570 3.4GHz (Quad cores, VT-x, VT-d)
- Memory – 32GB (4 x 8GB – Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz DDR3 C10)
- NIC (onboard) – Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet (Jumbo frames not supported)
- NIC (addon) – 2 x Intel 82574L Single port Gigabit PCI-E (a.k.a. Intel EXPI9301CTBLK)
- Video – Onboard Intel Integrated Graphics
- Power Supply – Seasonic S12 II Bronze 520W
- Case – Silverstone SUGO SG02-F (White and Black)
- HDD – 1x 1TB Western Digital Blue
- SSD – 1x Intel SSD 5 256GB
- Boot Drive – Sandisk Cruzer Blade 8GB
Nexenta Storage – the black tower (now decommissioned)
- Main board – ASUS P8H77-M
- Processor – Intel Pentium G2020 2.9GHz (Dual Cores)
- Memory – 16 GB (2 x 8GB – Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz DDR3 C10)
- NIC (onboard) – Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet
- NIC – 1 x Intel 82574L Single port Gigabit PCI-E (a.k.a. Intel EXPI9301CTBLK)
- Video – Onboard Intel Integrated Graphics
- Power Supply – Coolermaster 720W Silent Pro M2 PSU 80+ Bronze
- Case – Coolermaster HAF 912 Advanced Edition
- HDD – 4 x 1TB Western Digital Blue
- SSD – 2 x 120GB Corsair Force Series GT
- Boot Drive – Sandisk Cruzer Blade 8GB
Secondary / Backup Storage – the smaller black box in the photo
- Synology DS412+
- HDD – 4 x 3TB Western Digital Red
Network Switches – mounted upside down
- 2 x Dlink DGS-1008A