Posts Tagged ‘whitebox’

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 2: Building the ultimate Whitebox

In part 1 of this series I posted the way I selected hardware for my ultimate whitebox server. A whitebox server is a cheap server you can use to run VMware vSphere without it being on the VMware HCL. Never supported, but working nonetheless. Now that the hardware to use was selected and ordered from my local computer components dealer, the next step is to assemble and test the setup, which is the focus of this post.

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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:

  1. Build one big Windows/Linux server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on VMware Workstation);
  2. Build one big ESX(i) server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on the physical ESX node);
  3. Build two smaller ESX(i) servers (surprise suprise… this can actually be cheaper over one big node!);
  4. Buy a complete (supported) system (Like Dell or HP).

Read the rest of this entry »

Soon to come
  • Coming soon

    • Determining Linked Clone overhead
    • Designing the Future part1: Server-Storage fusion
    • Whiteboxing part 4: Networking your homelab
    • Deduplication: Great or greatly overrated?
    • Roads and routes
    • Stretching a VMware cluster and "sidedness"
    • Stretching VMware clusters - what noone tells you
    • VMware vSAN: What is it?
    • VMware snapshots explained
    • Whiteboxing part 3b: Using Nexenta for your homelab
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