Posts Tagged ‘home lab’
Whiteboxing part 3: Choosing storage for your homelab
After a long time I want to continue my series on building out your own home lab. Up next: Storage. What to choose, how to build it? I will be focussing on building out shared storage in this blog post. Yes you could use local disks just fine without sharing them outside that one box, but that is not where the hard choices lie. Once you decide you want shared storage, the questions start to pop up and decisions have to be made.
Different approaches to storage in your home lab
Before you start buying disks or SSDs, first things first. To begin with it is very important to make some base decisions. Some the most important Read the rest of this entry »
Whiteboxing part 1: Deciding on your ultimate ESX Whitebox
So you’ve decided: You want to build yourself an ESX(i) environment while minimizing cost. But how do you choose between available hardware? In this blogpost I will be focussing on my recent Whitebox server selecgtion and how I got to my configuration out of all available components.
Different ways of getting to a successful Whitebox config
There are several different ways of getting to a cheap Whitebox configuration. So far I’ve been seeing four approaches:
- Build one big Windows/Linux server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on VMware Workstation);
- Build one big ESX(i) server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on the physical ESX node);
- Build two smaller ESX(i) servers (surprise suprise… this can actually be cheaper over one big node!);
- Buy a complete (supported) system (Like Dell or HP).