James Kane Problems And Success In Creating A Frugal Home Lab
15
Inexpensive Home Lab James Kane Support Consultant - Strategic Thought Group Mark Minasi Forum Meeting April 2009
-
Upload
nathan-winters -
Category
Documents
-
view
668 -
download
0
description
Transcript of James Kane Problems And Success In Creating A Frugal Home Lab
Inexpensive Home Lab
James KaneSupport Consultant - Strategic Thought GroupMark Minasi Forum Meeting April 2009
Creating an inexpensive home lab
About myself Requirements Challenge My research The server build Advantages Risks Insights
Introduction
James Kane
I post on the Minasi forum as username chamezzzz
Member of the forum since 2002
Work for the Strategic Thought Group
Where I provide Technical Support and Administration
About Myself
Inexpensive– We are in a global recession
Scalable– The hardware can be expanded
Robust– Build a variety of environments
Replication – Especially problems encountered at my work place
Requirements
I wanted to use VMware ESXi
As I use this extensively in my workplace, however......
Supported hardware is expensive
Challenge
Performed my research Google searches
Found the following website, which is the inspiration for this presentation
http://www.techhead.co.uk
Run by a New Zealander named Simon Seagrave
Who is based in London
He is also a VMware vExpert & VMware Certified Professional
My Research
Hardware– HP Proliant ML115 Server– AMD 2.1GHz Opteron Quad Core– 1 x 1Gb NIC £150– 8GB Kingston Memory (4 x 2GB) £135– 2GB USB Memory Stick £5
Software– VMware ESXi Server £0– WinRAR £21– DD for Windows £0
Total Expenditure £311
Server Build
Process
– Download VMWare ESXi iso image
– Extract the Hypervisor using WinRAR
– Write the Hypervisor to the USB drive using DD for Windows
Server Build
Scalable- add Network Cards, Layer 2 Switch and iSCSI storage
Cost - advantages of Enterprise Virtualization at reduced cost
Flexible - not constrained by 8GB Memory
Advantages
Advantages
Advantages
Advantages
Advantages
Support– HP Proliant ML115 hardware is not supported by VMware
Redundancy– There is none in my presented setup and all of my eggs are in one basket
RAID – ML115 cannot use the onboard RAID to RAID more than 2 disks. – For disk redundancy a VMware ESXi supported controller such as the HP e200 controller
is required (supports RAID 0,1 and 5) with SATA disks.
Risks
BIOS Settings– Set boot device to USB– Ensure to enable ‘Secure Virtual Machine Mode’
Direct Disk extraction requires attention
HP Insight Agents will not work on this server (they only work on the HP Proliant 300 series of servers and higher)
Insights
