{"id":1452,"date":"2011-05-28T11:13:55","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T16:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/?p=1452"},"modified":"2011-12-30T09:33:44","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T15:33:44","slug":"vsphere-home-lab-what-type-of-hosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/vsphere-home-lab-what-type-of-hosts\/","title":{"rendered":"vSphere Home Lab – What type of hosts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lab environment is a very effective tool to keep up with technology, without having to worry about messing something up in a production environment.\u00a0 Several of the places I have worked have development\/test\/demo environments setup for the purpose of exactly that, development\/test\/demo work.\u00a0 I really couldn’t imagine testing new code, application or OS updates, or “what if” type scenarios in a production environment.\u00a0 But those environments weren’t really “lab” environments.<\/p>\n

From my experience, lab environments are often comprised of whatever equipment that can be found.\u00a0 They often are found under a cubicle desk, a staging area, or some closet.\u00a0 In a previous position, my ESX hosts were simply HP\/Compaq\u00a0 D510’s with Pentium 4 (without Hyper-Threading) processors, 2GB of RAM, and 40GB local disks.\u00a0 Those are terribly slow by today’s standards, and to be honest, they weren’t stellar then either.<\/p>\n

As a virtualization tech guy that is looking to build a home vSphere lab, there are a couple things that I need to take into account:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Will vSphere (current version) run on it without extensive modifications? (Like the work Dave’s doing at vm-help.com<\/strong><\/a>)<\/li>\n
  2. Will the next version of vSphere (whatever\/whenever that is) run on it without extensive modifications? – Simply speculation<\/li>\n
  3. Will alternate hypervisors run on it? (XenServer\/Hyper-V\/KVM\/etc) – Who knows, maybe some comparisons<\/li>\n
  4. Will it cost an arm and a leg? – What can I get, and at what price?<\/li>\n
  5. What are the dimensions of the hosts?<\/li>\n
  6. Will it be viable for a decent amount of time? – What is my RTO going to be?<\/li>\n
  7. The long debated question, Intel or AMD?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These are some important questions to ponder.<\/p>\n

    1. Will vSphere run on it without extensive modifications?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Any VMware rep\/tech\/enthusiast will simply say “Is it on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)?”\u00a0 That is the standard response.\u00a0 I’m not going to go into the whole HCL debate, but suffice to say that I personally would prefer as much compatibility as possible.\u00a0 I have upgraded a lab before, only to have the hosts fail on reboot after an updated release was installed. This can be a major pain.<\/p>\n

    2. Will the next version of vSphere run on it without extensive modifications?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    There is no way to truly know this until some new release is generally available.<\/p>\n

    3. Will alternate hypervisors run on it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The only way to know this, is to see if their minimum requirements are also met by the gear you choose.\u00a0 Hyper-V, when enabled in Windows 2008 R2, is pretty easy to determine, provided the processor\/motherboard has the appropriate virtualization instruction sets, as well as hardware drivers. XenServer and other Linux based hypervisors take a little more research.<\/p>\n

    4. Will it cost an arm and a leg?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    This is a pretty tough question. There are a couple things to take into account here.<\/p>\n

    A.\u00a0 What type of processor will be used?\u00a0 How many cores are needed? How many cores will be sufficient?<\/strong>
    \nFrom what I have seen in my previous labs, CPU is seldom a constraint, given “production” workloads aren’t typical.<\/p>\n

    B. What type of motherboard will be used? Is the chipset supported? Is the onboard nic supported?<\/strong>
    \nTo get a motherboard with an onboard nic that vSphere can use out of the box, typically a server-class motherboard has to be used.\u00a0 This can add anywhere from $100 to $300 to the cost of the motherboard.\u00a0 An alternative to using a server-class motherboard, would be to add supported nics to a desktop board.<\/p>\n

    C. How much RAM can be installed in the motherboard?\u00a0 What type of RAM does the motherboard require?<\/strong>
    \nDepending on the socket type and board type, anywhere from 2 to 6 memory slots can be found on desktop board, with server boards having up to 12 slots.\u00a0 That can be quite a bit of RAM.\u00a0 With memory stick sizes ranging from 1GB to 8GB, and their prices across the board, depending on size and memory type (DDR\/DDR2\/DDR3\/ECC), it can be a difficult task to get a good combination of price per GB. *Don’t forget that Server class motherboards often say they will use non-ECC or ECC RAM, but you may have issues anyway.\u00a0 Despite the cost difference, if you get a Server class motherboard with an ECC requirement, go ahead an be prepared to give up some more of your hard earned money.<\/p>\n

    D. Will local storage be used? Or will remote storage be used?<\/strong>
    \nNot really needed with vSphere, but there are some VSA’s available that can share storage across hosts to present a single datastore.\u00a0 Remote storage can be pricey, but there are some very good offerings out there.<\/p>\n

    E. What about environmental concerns like power and cooling?<\/strong>
    \nWhat size power supply does the whole setup require, as well as how hot is it going to run? Do I really need a 1kilowatt power supply? How much more will my utility bill be every month if I leave these hosts running 24×7 (electricity\/cooling)? There are quite a few low power options, but will they be fast\/efficient enough to perform appropriately?<\/p>\n

    5. What are the dimensions of the hosts?\u00a0 Where are they going to go? I live in Louisiana, no basements here.<\/strong>
    \nThere are many options for micro ATX sized systems, and coupled with a micro ATX slim case, they can get pretty small.<\/p>\n

    6. Will it be viable for a decent amount of time?<\/strong>
    \nI had a couple of Dell PowerEdge 2650’s several years ago.\u00a0 They were great for VI3, but when vSphere went GA, I found out that they weren’t usable anymore, given that they only had 32bit processors.\u00a0 Prime example of good equipment, that I had to put out to pasture, because they couldn’t keep up with the technology.<\/p>\n

    7. The long debated question, Intel or AMD?<\/strong>
    \nI was burned once by a Cyrix configuration, and almost by an AMD configuration.\u00a0 My gut tells me to stick with Intel<\/p>\n

    So those are the questions I’m currently pondering.\u00a0 What are you doing in your home lab? Feel free to take the poll on the right side of my blog, and tell me if you are using a Desktop or Server class configuration.\u00a0 Maybe I’ll get enough responses to push me one direction or another.<\/p>\n

    Thanks,
    \nJase<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A lab environment is a very effective tool to keep up with technology, without having to worry about messing something up in a production environment.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[38,53,111],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtualization","tag-esxi","tag-lab","tag-vsphere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1985,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions\/1985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}