The first part of a lab for me always involves the hardware components that make up that lab. Part of my background experience included me being responsible for gathering hardware requirements based on the use cases and working with vendors to come up with a bill of materials that will meet those use cases, so hardware is something I have always like working with.
Over the years I have accumulated a large amount of physical servers, network attached storage and desktops to being able to run those products that I have supported. In the recent months I have slimmed down my rack footprint considerably in an attempt to reduce the amount of electricity I’m using and with the introduction of nested ESXi, I have the capability to run multiple different workloads on a single physical system.
So my current hardware list consists of:
| QNAP TS431Xeu Rackmount NAS | Marvell CN913X Quad-core ARMv8 Cortex-A72 CPU @ 2.2GHz 32GB SODIMM DDR4 2 – 1TB Crucial M.2 PCIe SSD (RAID1 Cache) 4 – 18TB Seagate Exos 7.2K HDD |
| HP Proliant DL360 Gen 9 | 2 – Intel Xeon CPU E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz 24 – 64GB LRDIMM DDR4 2400MHz FlexFabric 10GB 2-Port 556FLR-SFP+ Adapter 2 – 2TB SanDisk SSD (RAID1) 3 – 4TB Crucial MX500 3D NANO SSD (RAID5) 1 – 8TB Samsung SSD (RAID0) |
| Dell PowerEdge R650 | 2 – Intel Xeon Gold 6330 CPU @ 2.00GHz 8 – 64GB DIMM DDR4 2666MHz Broadcom Dual Port 10GB Ethernet BOSS-S2 Embedded Controller w/(2) 240GB SSD (RAID1) 6 – 1.5TB NVMe PCIe SSD |
| (4) Intel NUC13ANHi7 | Intel 13th Gen Core i7-1360P CPU 2 – 32GB DDR4-3200 SODIMM 1 – 400GB Intel SSD 1 – 2TB Kingston NVMe PCIe SSD |
| (2) Intel NUC10i7FNH | Intel 10th Gen Core i7-107100 CPU 32GB DDR4-2667MHz SODIMM 1 – 480GB SanDisk SSD |
| (2) MSI Pro B760M Custom Desktop | Intel 12th Gen Core i7-12700K 3.6GHz 2 – 64GB DDR5 DIMM 10GB Dual Port Network Card 1 – 240GB Crucial 500 SSD 1 – 2TB Crucial PCIe NVMe SSD 1 – 512GB Silicon Power PCIe NVMe SSD |
| (2) MSI Pro B760M DDR4 Custom Desktop | Intel 14th Gen Core i9-14900k 2 – 64GB DDR4 DIMM 10GB Dual Port Network Card 1 – 240GB Crucial 500 SSD 1 – 2TB Samsung PCIe NVMe SSD 1 – 512GB Western Digital PCIe NVMe SSD |
| (1) Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro | Quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 1.7GHz 4GB System Memory 16GB On-Board Storage 1 – GBe RJ45 WAN 1 – 10G SFP+ WAN 8 – GBe RJ45 LAN |
| (1) Ubiquiti Unifi USW-Pro-48 | 48 – GBe RJ45 Layer 3 Switch |
| (2) Ubiquiti Unifi US-XG-16 | 12 – 1G/10G SFP+ Ports 4 – 1G/10G RJ45 Ports |