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VMGuru Lab, Coming Soon PDF Print
Written by Scott Herold   
Monday, 04 February 2008 16:25

IÂ’ve managed to scrap together enough money from website advertising, Google AdSense, and book sales from the first version of our book to build myself a nice little computer lab for my basement. With this lab I will be able to test some advanced configurations of multiple virtualization platforms.

What does this mean exactly? For starters, expect to start seeing new content on the site not only for VMware configurations, but also diving into the world of Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Sun Solaris xVM. IÂ’ll ultimately be providing a series of whitepapers that describes the alternate platforms in the easiest way for the typical VMware administrator to understand. IÂ’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of all platforms as well as provide use case scenarios that are best fitted for the various platforms.

For the geeks that are actually interested in the setup, the environment will contain the following:

1 @ Dell PowerConnect 6224 Layer 3 Switch
2 @ APC AP7931 Switched PDUs (Yes, IÂ’m that lazy)

1 @ Dell 2950 Single Quad-Core/4GB Memory/1TB Storage (Production iSCSI Target)

5 @ Dell SC1435 Dual Dual-Core/4GB Memory (All PXE bootable into different configurations)

2 @ Dell 2850 Dual Single-Core/6GB Memory (Existing ESX Test Environment)

1 @ Dell SC430 Single Single-Core/2GB Memory/1 TB Storage (Development iSCSI Target)
1 @ Dell 180AS Analog KVM Switch
1 @ Dell 24U Half Height Server Rack
 

For those of you wondering how I can actually get away with this without a divorce, I have a few pointers:

  1. Set up a Corporation or S-Corp and tell your spouse that if you donÂ’t spend the businessÂ’ money, you will get taxed on it.
  2. Tell your spouse “It’s my job to stay on top of the technology and work won’t pay for any equipment to help further my career”.
  3. DO NOT say (TRUST ME ON THIS) “You don’t seem to complain about the money I BRING IN because of the work I do."
  4. Do not let your spouse see the electric bill (VERY IMPORTANT).
  5. Make sure you have a place in your house where the servers can be placed without being heard. There is no bigger deal killer than having the omnipresent noise of a harrier jet in the spare bedroom.
  6. Hope the person you marry is awesome and really doesnÂ’t care either way (see hiding electric bill at #4)

As soon as all the equipment arrives, which it has already started, I’ll be sure to post pictures and final configurations of the initial environment, which will be a 5 Server Citrix XenServer Enterprise environment, built out with a mix of Server and Desktop (VDI) workloads. I’m also open to suggestions on what environments people are most interested in seeing for my “Round 2” environment.

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Patrick Glancy
Patrick Glancy
January 21, 2009
Votes: +0
Guru Lab

Geeky enough to be very interested in this set up...

Care to share what Dell I/O controller & dsik type you went with for these 'puters? Same question for NIC preference? Also, what app are you using on your two Dell iSCSI boxes to present the storage?
I am building a similar lab and looking to go the Dell route, so this was a great find...any more detailed specs would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

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