Jase's Place

vSphere 5 Lab Hosts – A Year Later

August 2nd, 2012 jase 15 comments

So I have had my lab hosts for about a year. I have to say that they have done pretty well. Because of the cost I configured these hosts with 16GB of RAM each. At the time I built them, 8GB sticks of RAM were about $250 a piece, which was a little bit out of my price range. I recently found some 8GB Kingston memory that wasn’t going to break the bank, and give me the ability to do more than I have been able to.

The initial configuration included the following components, and cost around $1,650 ($825/host) not counting shipping/etc.

2011 Configuration (2 Hosts w/16GB RAM Each)
Item	Model	Cost	Quantity	Total
Motherboard	Tyan S5510GM3NR	$189.99	2	$379.98
CPU	Intel E3-1230	$234.99	2	$469.98
Memory	4GB Unbuffered ECC RAM	$47.99	8	$383.92
NIC	EXPI9301CTBLK Single Port NIC	$24.99	4	$99.96
Case	Rosewill R379-M Case	$49.99	2	$99.98
SSD	64GB Microcenter G2 SSD	$99.99	2	$199.98
Adapter	HD Mounting Bracket	$3.49	2	$6.98
Power adapter	8″ 4 to 8 pin adapter	$4.99	2	$9.98
				$1,650.76

A year later some prices have changed, some additional processors are support on my boards, larger memory is a little cheaper, and SSD prices have declined.

Home Lab Hosts – Could it have been leaner? ($$$)

July 30th, 2011 jase 4 comments

I’ve had the lab running for a couple of weeks and I have made a few observations in relation to the configuration of each host.

As mentioned in my previous post Home Lab Hosts – Just in time for vSphere 5, I used server class motherboards, requiring ECC RAM, with iKVM, etc. Here are a couple things I noticed that stood out:

The CPUs
I chose the Intel Xeon E3-1230 processors because I wanted to be able to have quad cores with Hyperthreading, as well as support for VMDirectPath. In running 20 or so VMs my CPU utilization has been less than high. I haven’t had the opportunity to leverage VMDirectPath as of yet, but I am still happy I have the ability to.

If VMDirectPath support isn’t a big deal for you, an Intel i3-2100T (i3-2100 isn’t on the board HCL) should suffice to run most workloads. The i3-2100 series processors have dual cores and Hyperthreading. These processors retailed about $100 less each on NewEgg than the E3-1230 processors did. Alternatively if you aren’t nesting as many ESXi hosts (I have 8 right now), you could also look at the Intel Pentium G620 which is similar to the i3-2100 series, but without Hyperthreading. Those retail for about $77 each.

Home Lab Hosts – Just in time for vSphere 5

July 19th, 2011 jase 42 comments

I’ve been looking at what type of hardware for a home lab for quite a while.

Several people have setup some pretty decent/usable home labs… Here are a few to point out:

Kendrick Coleman – vSphere Home Lab – “The Green Machines”
Jeramiah Dooley – VMware vSphere Home Lab: Keeping up with the Joneses
Tommy Trogden – The VMware Home Lab
Duncan Epping – My Homelab
Simon Seagrave – VMware ESX(i) Home Lab; Why, What and How? Considerations when building your own home lab.

As I mentioned in a previous post, picking hosts can be a daunting task. The process of picking hosts includes taking a few things into account. I looked at desktop configurations that would support vSphere and server configurations that vSphere supports.

Disclaimer

Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. While I am a blogger who works for EMC, I am not an EMC blogger; therefore, I am solely responsible for all content published here. This is a personal blog, not an EMC blog. Content published here is not read, reviewed, or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily represent or reflect the views or opinions of EMC or any of its divisions, subsidiaries, or business partners.

Any of my code, configuration references, or suggestions, should be researched and verified in a lab environment before attempting in a production environment.

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