Seeing how I have some free time on my hands I decided why not rebuild my homelab. My homelab hasn’t been powered-on in over a year now, as my previous job allowed me to work with vSphere, Horizon Suite, vRealize Suite, & NSX. So needless to say there was allot of dust build-up which was quickly remedied by a AirBoss Compressor and the trusty Swiffer an hour later everything was dust free. 😀
This will be a short series of me rebuilding my homelab with vSphere/vCenter:
- Environment Overview
- Create a Custom ESXi Image
- Installing a Custom ESXi 6.5 Image
- Configure a vSphere 6.5 ESXi Host
- Setting up Infrastructure Components (AD / DNS / DHCP)
- Deploying a vCenter 6.5 Appliance
Environment Overview
A couple years ago I put together a parts lists found here of all equipment used in my lab. The environment hasn’t changed much besides adding more SSD/HDD for vSAN last year. I went with dedicated hardware as I am a tech nerd at heart, who loves any excuse to build something. The environment consists of 3 hosts and all 3 hosts will participate in a vSAN cluster running over the 20GB infiniband network. The Synology 1813+ is used for iSCSI and NFS datastores. As you can imagine my biggest constraint is memory (96GB), so next year I hope to add 3 additional hosts (128GB of memory each) and a 10GB network. Which may require upgrading electric panels to a higher amperage to support it. That’s gonna to wrap up this post stay tuned for the next post where I’ll go over how to Create a Custom ESXi Image.
The diagram below provides an overview of the environment:
