vmware home lab

[im4gine3]

hey all,

Nore: Feel free to move this to Server forum, but given the hardware i'm looking at is more SFF, thought would be ideal here too


For anyone experienced with vmware, i currently have a Asrock Deskmini which i use as a small lab with ESXi on it using nested virtualization... but i am limited by the amount of memory for what i want to play around with.. mainly VSAN, vRealize Operations, Horizon View, NSX etc.

My main goal is to set up a 3 node cluster, and wondered whether i can mix and match hardware configurations? I see plenty of articles with BOM and custom setups but they all seem to use 2+ identical hardware, whereas i'll be using:

1x Asrock Deskmini H110 - i5 8400T with 32Gb Memory
1x Supermicro SYS-300 9D - Xeon D-2123IT with 64Gb memory (expandable to 512GB using LRDIMM or 256GB RDIMM in the future) (Contemplating on purchasing)
1x My personal rig which runs on Ryzen 5800x with 64Gb memory - acting as a witness server
1x My Synology DS413J NAS

Is that possible or do i need to purchase/have 3x identical hardware? e.g. 3x Intel Nuc Baby Canyon or 3x Asrock Deskmini H110

 

[ballj]

You dont 'need' to have the same hardware, however it certainly makes it easier and performance more predictable.

You can enable VMware EVC to allow two different cpus (from the same vendor) to be in the same cluster, and vmotion guests between them.
VSAN uses up a lot of disk space (raw vs usable)- it makes an all flash VSAN pretty expensive, even for a couple of nodes. Worth factoring into your pricing and use-case? I believe you can test VSAN with nested virtualization nowadays.

There are special notes on 2 and 3 VSAN clusters - https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-v...UID-57575456-0AD9-4655-9D6B-58509C1DF33C.html

Lastly, im not sure i'd want to run VSAN on less than 10gbps, so if you have a 2 node cluster, you can do back-to-back 10G with a couple of network cards for a resonable price, less than ~£100 for 2)