20 06, 2014

My New Dual-Xeon Based Nested Home Lab Machine – Part II

By |2016-12-11T15:25:03+00:00June 20th, 2014|Hardware, How To, Virtual Lab, Workstation|8 Comments

In the previous post, I explained the need for a new machine in my home lab and the considerations before buying appropriate components to build one. In this post, I will look at the "Physical Decision Points" and the "Bill of Materials" (read "damage") for those components. So, without further ado, let's start: Physical Decision [...]

4 02, 2014

Why enabling NIOC (Network I/O Control) in a home lab is a good idea?

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00February 4th, 2014|ESX, NIOC, vCenter, View, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Workstation|4 Comments

We all know that Network I/O Control is your friend when it comes to production deployments of vSphere in general.  Today, I quickly wanted to make a point that NIOC is also great when it comes to home labs and why we should have it enabled, if possible. A few days back, I was deploying [...]

30 09, 2013

How to create shared iSCSI storage for ESXi using StarWind’s iSCSI SAN Software

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00September 30th, 2013|Cloud, ESX, How To, SRM, StarWind, vCenter, VDI, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|3 Comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab.  In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup.  Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]

12 08, 2013

StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN: Shared Storage for my VMware Workstation Powered Lab

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00August 12th, 2013|ESX, Review, StarWind, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|1 Comment

Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions.  One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite.  In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]

4 02, 2013

Converting VMware Workstation Thick Disks (VMDKs) to Thin

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00February 4th, 2013|ESX, vCenter, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Workstation|1 Comment

Recently, I built a new machine for my lab (for those interested in the story, here are Parts I, II and III).  I put a 512GB SSD in the new machine with the aim to thin-provision all virtual machines but still get good performance, due to the high number of IOPS/read/write you get from SSDs.  Once [...]

28 01, 2013

Building (or Upgrading) a Virtual Home Lab Machine – Part III

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00January 28th, 2013|Hardware, vCenter, View, Virtual Lab, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|5 Comments

In the first and second posts of this series, I covered my thought process for deciding what hardware and software to use for my new lab machine and then what I actually bought and built, respectively.  In this last post of the series, I intend to cover some optimizations I did after the build, some [...]

31 10, 2012

Building (or Upgrading) a Virtual Home Lab Machine – Part II

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00October 31st, 2012|Hardware, Strategy, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|3 Comments

In my last post, I discussed the things that are important to me when I am considering to build a new machine for my lab and my reasons for choosing certain options when building a new one.  I promised to report on what I bought and built after making the decisions above and how it went, [...]

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