Scott Herold over at the newly revivified VMguru is laying out his home lab setup for us post by post. Make sure you have plenty of power!
VMGuru Lab: Network Infrastructure
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.
My operating system of choice was Ubuntu 7.10 Server. Let me start by
saying it would have absolutely been 10X easier to build this server
had I used Ubuntu 6.06 Server. The iSCSI Enterprise Target software is
not available in the universe repositories and had to be compiled, and
only then after modification to the make file.One thing that some people may notice about the configuration is it
is unique in the fact that I have specified a ScsiSN value to each LUN.
While poking around and trying to get the stupid thing to properly
build I saw that there was a README.vmware file in the build directory.
I figured it might actually apply to what I was doing so decided to
open it up. As I expected, it absolutely applied and made sense of some
wierd issues I had seen in the past.
Make sure you check out the comments from VMware Communities regular Jason Boche, who has his own home lab. [via]
Rich Brambley at VM /ETC has also been posting about white box and on-the-cheap VI setups. See this post: Cheap ESX solutions for testing, where he points to some great threads at VMware Communities — this has been a rolling discussion for years. See also
ESX home lab hardware shopping list. (Actually, take a look at VM /ETC for the whole month of March — resource pools, VDM, small business P2V, monitoring, and more. Rich is kicking @$$ over there.)
How’s your home lab spec’ed out? Post something on your blog or drop me a line. I’m always jtroyer [at] vmware.
