Homelab Rebuild

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:

  1. Environment Overview
  2. Create a Custom ESXi Image
  3. Installing a Custom ESXi 6.5 Image
  4. Configure a vSphere 6.5 ESXi Host
  5. Setting up Infrastructure Components (AD / DNS / DHCP)
  6. 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:





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