irgNET – LAB 7.0
It is HomeLab time again, this update comes with a BIG announcement/change! It is been a while, the last update was in August. Let us get started:
I was able to get 3 Dell PowerEdge R730 servers. As you know, a General Availability of vSphere 8 has been announced. My HPE DL380 Gen8 servers and my HPE ML310 Gen8 v2 are getting on in years and are not necessarily close to the most modern technology.
Anyone who owns these server models and has VMware ESXi 7.0 (no matter which update) installed will be familiar with this kind of message; “This CPU is not supported in the newer versions of VMware vSphere“. So I started to look around, new hardware is needed!
As I mentioned, I got 3x Dell PowerEdge R730, here I have the option to switch between Haswell (v3) and Broadwell (v4) CPUs. With the beta of VMware vSphere 8 it turned out that v3 CPUs are completely sufficient for HomeLabs, so I saw no need to upgrade to Broadwell v4 CPUs.
The servers are all equipped with 8x 16GB DDR4 memory, in the next updates I will change the configuration, because my focus is of course on VMware vSAN again, but DDR4 memory modules are much more expensive than DDR3 modules. On the network side I have 2x 10GbE SFP+ (VM traffic) and 2x 40GbE QSFP (vSAN/vMotion traffic) interfaces, as well 1x 1GbE iDRAC as onboard management. If you want to see the specs from the old environment, I described the details in the HomeLab Update 4.0 U2:
Speaking of VMware vSAN – in irgNET Lab 7.0 U1 we will talk about a superlative vSAN upgrade, so stay tuned! 😉
Another reason to switch to Dell PowerEdge servers is that we see more and more that their products are much better integrated into the VMware world i.e. with Dell VxRail HCI servers or Dell OME. Last but not least, I am proud to say that I have been selected by Dell Technologies as a Funded Head to help drive these great products forward. This means for you, the next HomeLab updates will be flavoured with “Dell” in one or the other place. 🙂
Besides the new hardware, there were some new applications added, which I will also introduce to you in the next updates. As with every update, I have of course also made a drawing this time:
That is it from this great update and stay tuned for the next ones. I will write my HomeLab updates monthly from now on, because there are a lot of things to tell. 🙂