irgNET – LAB 8.0 U1
I want to start my 8.0 HomeLab U1 Update with a full lifecycle, which means that all my 13th Gen Dell PowerEdge servers have been replaced by 14th Gen Dell PowerEdge servers and my Datacenter has even grown. But that’s not all – I’ve implemented 2 new Data Protection solutions in my Datacenter – Dell PowerProtect & Cohesity and I’ve replaced my HPE 1GbE switches with Ubiquiti 1GbE switches to integrate them into my Ubiquiti world.
You can find my last state with the 13th Gen Dell PowerEdge Server here:
Well, first of all, let’s take a look at Datacenter 02. On the network side, apart from the Ubiquiti 1GbE switches, nothing has changed, my VMware SD-WAN / SASE solution still works very reliably. The Dell PowerEdge T430 tower server was replaced by a Dell PowerEdge R640 rack server with the following specs:
2x Intel Xeon Gold 6240 CPU
384GB Memory
2 Ports 10/25GbE NIC
The three PowerEdge R730 servers were replaced with 4x R740 servers, each configured as a 2-node cluster running VMware vSAN OSA on one and VMware vSAN ESA architectures on the other. The OSA cluster is my Prod Cluster, on which all workloads run. The ESA cluster is too small for my environment due to its storage capacity and is therefore used as a test/lab cluster. For the ESA cluster I used Intel Optane drives, which I got as a member of the vExpert community for testing purposes, see more here:
Let’s take another look at the R740s, I’m also starting to get into the 25GbE range, which is really fun in the vSAN context, but for now over crossover. 25GbE switches are still really expensive, so if anyone out there wants to donate one, I’d love to! 🙂
In addition, all R740s have two Intel Intel Xeon Silver 4114 CPU and 768GB of RAM, which makes future workloads, tests and more easy to implement.
I have already written an introduction to Dell PowerProtect on the subject of backup/data protection in the past. In the meantime, there are a few more blog posts on the subject, as I am writing from my day-to-day business. Cohesity will follow.
This generation update has been really good, I’m not too far behind in terms of support & co. Products from VMware such as Aria Operations, Operations for Logs (formerly known as Log Insight) may become a topic in the next LAB updates.
In terms of hardware, I’m all set for now and this is what it looks like:
