My HomeLab setup

On end of last year, I started to slowly build up up a home lab to be able to test all kinds of things, and to study more some of our own applications.

And don't get me wrong here, we have a great demo environments, but they are something that you are not supposed to break down. And sometimes, to really understand that how things work, you actually need to break them.

So I decided that I finally need to build up my own home lab environment.

And here is my current physical setup:

VMware (all in version 6.7):

•  Virtual vCenter Appliance
• "Production" Cluster:
• 1x Intel NUC8i5BEK, i5-8259U @ 2.3 GHz, 64GB RAM
• 1x Intel NUC7i3BNK, i3-7100U @ 2.4 GHz, 32GB RAM
• 1x Omen by HP laptop, i7-8750H @ 2.20GHz, 16GB RAM. This one I occasionally boot up from USB-disk containing ESX installation, if I need temporarily more compute power, or to test some DR scenarios etc.

Hyper-V, standalone host, Win 2016 Core

• ASUS UX303L laptop, Intel® Core™ i7 4510U @ 2GHz, 8GB. This is my old laptop with broken display. Only sad thing with this is that it wont boot if it's not attached to some display while booting, have not figured out how to bypass that. This one uses local SSD in laptop, so no connection to shared storage.

Network:

• HP OfficeConnect Switch 1820-24G. This is reasonably priced (web)managed switch, and at least in my home lab 1 Gbps connections are fast enough. Still for my Storage I did a 2 Gbps trunk.

Storage:

• QNAP TS879 Pro, equipped with 8x 3TB disks. And configured to RAID-10. So more than enough of capacity and performance for my needs. This is my main storage for the VMware environment. Disks are both iSCSI and NFS (Why both? Well, because I can). Connected to my switch with 2x links, so I have 2 Gbps connection for storage.
• Buffalo LinkStation LS220D. This is my secondary storage for homelab and primary storage for my personal files. And I use it as a secondary backup target for my homelab, and use my QNAP as a primary backup target for files in this one.

Firewall: 

• pfSense, running in virtual machine. Only one node, but since I now have to hosts, I'm going to make this one HA

So, what do I do with this environment then, and what do I have running in there?

Well, besides the basic infra services that you just have to have (DNS, AD etc) I have installed for example:

• VMware Orchestrator 7.6 (<- I hopefully have some time to blog about this later)
• A lot of Veeam stuff, including:
• Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5U4b and V10 beta1 (<- Yes, it's out!)
• Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2 (<- I'm planning to blog about this also)
• Veeam One v9.5
• Veeam Backup for Office 365 v3

I have also been playing around with Minio lately. (Hint, it has a lot to do with Backup & Replication)

Best here is, that I can pretty much test anything I want to, and if (read: when) I mess up with something, it only affects me, not anyone else.

And, hopefully this will help me to write a lot more blog posts.