Lab Upgrade

It’s time for an upgrade to the vmfocus.com lab.  The existing hardware has been great, however when trying to run View, alongside SRM, every compute area became a bottleneck.

I’m fortunate enough to have been offered some free colo which is pretty awesome.  The plan is to be able to use Horizon View, Workspace and SRM along with vCenter and a few other components.  So with this in mind, the new lab will consist of the following:

ESXi Hosts

• 2 x HP ProLiant DL380 G6
• 4 x Intel Xeon L5520 Quad Core 2.26GHz giving a total of 32 Hyper Threaded Cores
• 2 x 72GB RAM
• 16 x 1GB NIC’s (2 x Quad Port Built in, 2 x Quad Port,)
• 2 x P400 Smart Array 256MB BBWC 3Gb/s
• 8 x 72GB 15K SAS HDD
• 8 x 2.5″ Drive Caddies
• 4 x PSU
• 2 x iLO

Storage

• 2 x Samsung EVO 250GB 2.5″ SSD 6Gb/s
• 2 x Hitachi Travelstar 7.2K 1TB 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s
• 8 x HP 72GB 10K SAS

Network

• 1 x HP v1910 24G Layer 2 switch with static routing

Configuration – ESXi01

The plan is to boot ESXi from internal SD card and use RAID 1 local storage.

Tier 1 Storage – RAID 1 using 2 x Samsung EVO 250GB SSD

Tier 2 Storage  – RAID 1 using 2 x HP 72GB 10K SAS

vSwitch 1 – 2 x NIC’s for Management traffic up linked to HP v1910 24G

vSwitch 2 – 2 x NIC’s for vMotion up linked directly to ESXi02

vSwitch 3 – 4 x NIC’s for Virtual Machine traffic up linked to HP v1910 24G

Configuration – ESXi02

The plan is to boot ESXi from internal SD card and use RAID 1 local storage.

Tier 2 Storage –  RAID 1 using 2 x HP 72GB 10K SAS

Tier 3 Storage  – RAID 1 using 2 x HDS 1TB 7.2K SATA

vSwitch 1 – 2 x NIC’s for Management traffic up linked to HP v1910 24G

vSwitch 2 – 2 x NIC’s for vMotion up linked directly to ESXi02

vSwitch 3 – 4 x NIC’s for Virtual Machine traffic up linked to HP v1910 24G

This is the logical design for the upgraded vmfocus.com lab

You might be thinking this doesn’t give me HA or certain DRS features.  You would be right in saying that.  When the budget allows, I will buy a shared storage platform.

Fingers crossed I should have this up and running within the next few weeks.