irgNET – LAB 8.0
I know it’s been a long time, almost 1 year (in 2 days), so it’s time for another HomeLab update. In my last HomeLab update I told you about my VMware SD-WAN / SASE solution, this time we’ll take another look at my Data Protection Server. Because I replaced it with a Dell PowerEdge T430 in November 2023. You can find the documentation of my old Data Protection Server here:
Due to increased requirements and the change of my data protection solution from Veeam to Dell PowerProtect, the T330’s capabilities were no longer sufficient. I could only upgrade it to a maximum of 64GB of RAM, and I used this server not only as a data protection appliance, but also as a fallback server when I needed to do something in my VMware vSAN 2-node cluster.
This means that the Dell PowerProtect Appliances as well as the vCenter and other applications necessary for operation were running on the T330, which quickly pushed it to its limits. In addition, due to CPU model differences, I had to enable EVC mode in my vCenter, which I am not a fan of at all.
To deal with all these circumstances, I bought the above-mentioned Dell PowerEdge T430. This is a perfectly scalable server according to my requirements, e.g. up to 384GB RAM, 2x Intel Broadwell CPU and multiple PCI slots. My configuration was as follows:
2x Intel Xeon 2680 v3 12x 2,5 Ghz 24T
12x 8GB RAM (total: 96GB)
8x 1,2TB SAS 10k HDDs
4x 800GB SAS SSD
Dell Perc Raid Controller (external)
2 Port 10GbE
2 Port 1GbE
1 dedicated iDRAC Port
The external USB hard drive has also become unnecessary thanks to the large amount of local storage. This has given me the perfect war machine for Data Protection and fallback situations. 😎
I have written several blog posts about Dell PowerProtect, where I talk about the product and share my opinion, here an example:
That’s it for this blog post, stay tuned for the next update, something BIG is about to happen! I want to end by showing you my current HomeLab status – as always 😉
[…] irgNET – LAB 8.0 […]