The very long over due followup post to my The Home Lab entry made earlier this year. I did recently purchase another 64GB (2x 32GB) Diamond Black DDR4 memory to bring my server up to 128GB. I had some old 1TB spinning disks I installed in the box for some extra storage as well, although I will phase them out with more SSDs in the future. So as a recap, this is my setup now:
Motherboard
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SDV-TLN4F-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard Xeon processor D-1541 FCBGA 1667
Memory
(x2) Black Diamond Memory 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Server Memory Model BD32GX22133MQR26
M.2 SSD
WD Blue M.2 250GB Internal SSD Solid State Drive – SATA 6Gb/s – WDS250G1B0B
SSD
(x 2) SAMSUNG 850 PRO 2.5″ 512GB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7KE512BW
Case
SUPERMICRO CSE-721TQ-250B Black Mini-Tower Server Case 250W Flex ATX Multi-output Bronze Power Supply
Additional Storage
x2 1TB Western Digital Black spinning disks
Initially when I built the lab, I decided to use VMware workstation, but I recently just rebuilt it, installing ESXi 6.7 as the base. Largely for better performance and reliability. For the time being this will be a single host environment, but keeping with the versioning, vCSA and vROps are 6.7 as well. Can an HTML 5 interface be sexy? This has come a long way from the flash client days.
I decided against fully configuring this host as a single vSAN node, just so that I can have the extra disk. However, when I do decide to purchase more hardware and build a second or third box, this setup will allow me to grow my environment, and reconfigure it for vSAN use. Although I am tempted to ingest the SSDs into my NAS, carve out datastores from it and not use vSAN, at least for the base storage.
Networking is flat for now, so there’s nothing really to show here. As I expand and add a second host, I will be looking at some networking hardware, and have my lab in it’s own isolated space.
Now that I am in the professional services space, working with VMware customers, I needed a lab that was more production. I’m still building out the lab so I’ll have more content to come.
CaptainvOPS 
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