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Tonight was round 1 of setting up the new virtualization lab and it was entirely dedicated to the network infrastructure. I had completely forgotten how much of a pain in the ass it is to configure even a simple layer 3 network from scratch...especially when you haven't touched the stuff directly in 3 years.
Needless to say, I was able to power through with minimal cursing and no thrown or kicked components. What ended up being the most challenging aspect of the entire process was digging through my boxes of old computer junk that I refuse to throw away to find my null modem cable. I'm glad I was able to find it because I truly question the ability to walk into a retail store and buy one now-a-days.
I had originally intended to configure a single, newly acquired, layer 3 switch to power my entire network lab network. While digging through my boxes of junk, I found an old Dell PowerConnect 5224 layer 2 switch. I quickly whipped up the excuse that if I were at a customer site I would cringe at the thought of an iSCSI network not being a completely separate physical infrastructure from their production network and figured, "Why should my lab environment be any different?" After some quick surgery to bend various thin metal components into something that resembled their original shape I was ready to fire them up and perform the configuration.
What I was able to come up with is displayed in the following diagram:
As you can see, the design is rather simplistic and since all of my routing is centralized to a single device, I do not need to worry about OSPF or RIP configurations in the environment. VLAN 10 is the infrastructure VLAN which will contain the IP addresses for network switch management, my APC switchable PDU units, the internal interface of my firewall, and any other network component that is not a server node. This VLAN is routable.
VLAN 11 will contain my current environment which consists of my personal Active Directory domain and Exchange servers. I pretty much created this VLAN so I don't need to reconfigure the desktops and printers that I already have set up. This VLAN is also routable.
VLAN 12 is a new network that will contain the entire lab environment. I will also move certain components such as the VMGuru.com web server to this new VLAN to have complete separation of this stuff from the "home network". If nothing else, it's just one more VLAN to stretch the limits of the networking configurations in my environment as much as I can. This VLAN is also routable.
VLAN 13 is the last VLAN that I will have and it is a dedicated iSCSI network. I used GVRP to push this VLAN from the layer 3 switch over an 802.1q trunk port so I can centrally manage all VLANs from a single device instead of duplicating any modifications I may make to the VLAN. This VLAN is NOT routable and will only be available on the 5224 layer 2 switch for dedicated iSCSI traffic. As you will see in the next segment, I will actually be configuring a 3Gb bond on my iSCSI server to try to maximize my bandwidth for some relatively high-speed testing.
I am actually hoping that the half rack will arrive tomorrow so I can start to fire up some of the servers. Don't expect any further updates on the lab until next weekend. I will be in Vegas from Sunday to Tuesday this week attending Quest Software's 2008 sales kickoff. Normally it's pretty dangerous to put a technical person in the middle of a big bright city with a sales force of 1000 strong, but I'm expecting that I will be able to pretend to be one of them for a few days to at least survive the relatively short trip...just don't hold it against me.
The following image is a view of the VMGuru lab as of 10:40PM CST on February 8, 2008:
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