Updated: 9/27/2015
My lab home lab consists of basically 3 labs all wrapped up into one:
1) VMware/MSCE lab
2) CCNA lab
3) Raspberry Lab
VMware/MSCE lab: The lab consists of Two R610’s (Dual Xeon’s – Hyper-Threading-32GB’s of ram each) on a QNAP TS-420 8 TB NAS connected to a Dell PowerConnect 2848 only being used with two vlans one for iSCSI (vSwitch2) between the servers and the QNAP (jumbo-frame enabled, MTU @ 9000) and one for vMotion (vSwitch1); the production/management network (vSwitch0) is being managed over a vlan on the HP Procurve 2910al-48G-POE+ switch that is connected with a static route to the primary vlan which is connected to a Sonicwall TZ 105.
Also vCenter is installed on a OptiPlex desktop that has two Broadcom nic’s (1 for home-lan and 1 for iSCSI – vCenter snapshots go to the QNAP to backup the database) and 32 GB’s of RAM on a i7 with 2008 R2 with vCenter installed onto the desktop that manages the R610 cluster. Right now ESXi 5.1 is locally install on the RAID 5 300 GB Enteprise-grade WD Raptor array but the datastores on both R610’s are linked to the QNAP NAS to take advantage of vMotion vStorage.
Also embedded in the cluster is a Windows Server 2008 R2 (Technet) lab with two DC’s, a few Windows 7 boxes, and a FTP/Web Server. Email is being done through Elastix’s. To provide a out-of-cluster Domain sustainability effect, one of the newly acquire Banana Pi’s has Ubuntu Server 14.04 on it with Samba LDAP Secondary DC on it (it only uses 4 watts a day, like comon!). This lab is small, it’s not due to be fully built until after the Cisco is done.
NOTE: as of September 20th 2015, the VMware cluster has been upgraded to VMware ESXi 6.0 from vExpert 2015 licensing.
The lab consists of the following:
1) 2 x Dell R610 Servers (Dual Xeon 2.93ghz HT) with 32GB of RAM each (each server has (16) 1 Gbit Nics) – NOTE: plans for a third server in the future for a N+2 cluster.
2) HP Procurve 2910al MDF L3 switch (Primary vLAN, Wireless vLAN, Cisco lab vLAN’s)
3) HP Procurve 2848 switch L3 switch (vMotion and iSCSI vLAN’s) – Isolated switch
4) Sonicwall TZ 105 IPS Firewall – replaced the TZ 210
5) Dell OptiPlex Desktop being used as a vCenter Appliance
6) QNAP TS-420 NAS on a RAID 5 array totaling 8TB of storage (Network storage and VMware 5.5 datastores)
CCNA lab: This lab is a work in progress. I’ve gotten kind of side tracked by it since I got accepted into the ICM class at Stanly for 5.1 so VMware has been my focus. Once VMware for VCP-DCV 5.5 is done I’ll come back to CCNA. I’ll be sure to re-do the lab then and post on here the design.
1) 2 x 2821 Routers (Dual Gigabit ethernet with 1G SFP+ to core HP Procueve)
2) 2 x 1721 router – RETIRED, replaced by 2821’s
3) 2 x 2600 routers – Used for Remote network Emulation – NOTE: two more 2600XM’s on order with 4 port serials for frame-relay.
4) 2 x 3550 (Layer 3) switches – Used for Remote network Emulation
5) 4 x 3750G (Layer 3) switch (c3750-ipservicesk9 firmware)
6) 4 x 2950 switches – RETIRED, replaced by 3750G’s without L3 functions enabled, however may use them soley for testing purposes.
7) Cisco ASA 5505 + Security Plus
Raspberry PI Lab: This lab is exciting to say the least, I have 3 of them and they are all overclocked with copper heatsink’s and artic silver to 1 Ghz each.
1) one is a DHCP for wireless on the wireless vLAN
2) one is a DNS/Primary DC for my home network for the VMware 5.5 cluster, gotta have one physical server and at 1.5 watts common!!!!
3) last one is a media center server, in entertainment room for a PLEX server on network.
Below is a flow chart of the home-lab:
The below graph isn’t to scale correctly since this was created the VMware lab is on it’s own vlan into the MDF depicted in the flowchart; additionally a HP 2848 switch separates iSCSI frames and vMotion from the primary switch.
I found this worked better from a production and functionality stand point, but in reality that’s best practice in a production environment.
Well I think that’s enough for now.
-Trevor