irgNET – LAB 8.0 U2

Let’s start the year with a HomeLab update! Well, my HomeLab grows from year to year with big steps. After finishing my 14th generation Dell server upgrade, it was time to focus on the VMware Holodeck. I swapped out my Dell PowerEdge R640 for a new R740 that was designed for data protection, so I can use the R640 for the Holodeck only, which requires a physical server.

Maybe you are asking yourself, why I am not using my 4x Dell PowerEdge R740s in Datacenter 01 for a Consolidated Design VMware Cloud Foundation Stack, there are three reason:

• I don’t have enough SSDs to create a physical VMware VCF Cluster (Consolidated Design)
• More important: I don’t want to pay the power costs
• I want to stay flexible for other use cases,

but as mentioned before there is a great solution called Holodeck:

VMware by Broadcom Resource Center

Please click on VMware by Broadcom Resource Center to get the latest information on VMware Cloud Foundation Holodeck.

Holodeck Overview

Please click on Holodeck Overview for more detailed informations about the Holodeck.

In short, Holodeck is a fully automated, nested VMware Cloud Foundation deployment where the network and all components, e.g. 1x 4-Node Management Domain and 1x 4-Node Workload Domain plus the Aria suite, are running isolated on a single physical server. This is the perfect opportunity for HomeLabbers who may not want to spend a lot of money on hardware, but want to take full advantage of VMware Cloud Foundation. It is the easiest way to educate yourself in VMware Cloud Foundation, broken down into the individual products in addition to the classic vSphere, i.e. vSAN, NSX and Aria Automation, Operations and Operations for Logs. If something breaks, the environment can be easily redeployed thanks to integrated automation.

The approximate hardware requirements for the above deployment are as follows:

• 20 CPU cores,
• 512GB memory
• 2.5TB All Flash disk

My chosen Dell PowerEdge R660 has the following specs:

• 2x Intel XEON Gold CPU with 24 Cores
• 1,5TB memory
• 10TB All Flash Disk

This makes it ideal for further Holodeck deployments, such as deploying VMware VCF in a stretched cluster.

I will write a How-To on Holodeck in future, so I can share my experience with you. Now let’s take a look at the current state of my HomeLab:

Compute

• 1x Dell R740 in Datacenter 02 used for Dell PowerProtect for Data Protection Solution
  as well as my vSAN Witness Host (click on PowerProtect for more informations)
• 1x Dell R660 in Datacenter 01 used for my VMware Holodeck Environment
  with RAID 5 VMFS
• 2x Dell R740 in Datacenter 01 used as my Production Cluster
  with vSAN OSA 25GbE cross connected
• 2x Dell R740 in Datacenter 02 used as my Test Cluster for and
  with vSAN ESA 25GbE cross connected (click on vSAN ESA for more informations)

Storage

As already mentioned mixed use of VMware vSAN as well as classic RAID VMFS Datastores.

Networking

• VMware VeloCloud for redundant Internet connection
• Ubiquiti 10GbE Switches
• Ubiquiti 1GbE Switches
• Ubiquiti Access Points for Wireless Networking

The above components can be found here in my drawing for illustration:

That’s it for this HomeLab update, if you have any ideas, suggestions, questions about the World of HomeLabs or don’t know how to get started, feel free to leave a comment or contact me via LinkedIn or X. 🙂