As an IT professional with over 20 years of experience, I have had the pleasure of working with VMware products for a significant portion of my career. My journey with VMware began with ESX 1.5.x, and I have been involved in the vExpert community since 2018. As a vExpert Pro since 2020, I have had the opportunity to work with various VMware products and explore their capabilities.
In my lab environment, I have several servers, including 3 Dell T130 and 5 older IBM x3250 servers. These servers are built with maximum memory available, with 64 GB for the Dell servers and 32 GB for the IBM servers. This approach was adopted from an early time in virtualization, where I learned that CPU is not as important as memory for most use cases.
The network in my lab consists of Cisco Catalyst switches (3750x), Cisco Routers (800 Series), and a SoHo FortiGate firewall. Storage is made up of Synology boxes hooked up as iSCSI devices, as well as internal SSDs on the Dell servers. This setup allows me to have a fully functional lab environment for testing and experimenting with various VMware products.
Currently, my lab environment consists of three Dell servers, one Catalyst switch for networking traffic, and a second Catalyst switch for storage traffic. This setup is intentional, as it allows me to restart the normal network without impacting the whole lab. The three Dell servers host various VMware products such as vROps clusters, Windows Servers for AD, Log Insight server, vRA 7.6, and a few other bips and bops.
However, I have been thinking about expanding my setup to include more sites and use cases. One idea I have considered is adding two more sites using the old IBM servers, which are still supported by VMware with ESXI 6.7u2. This would allow me to explore SRM and remote collectors for vROps, as well as deploy NSX-T.
Another idea I have considered is reconfiguring my current three Dell servers and the network topology. I could add a connection to where the IBM servers are located using Devolo power over Ethernet adapters. This would allow me to simulate interim power site failures in my home lab and test SRM across multiple sites.
Additionally, I could split the five IBM servers into a second management cluster, which would allow me to run SRM across both clusters. This setup would also enable me to explore other use cases such as payload clustering for VRA or deploying NSX-T.
Overall, my lab environment is currently well-suited to my needs, but I am excited about the possibilities of expanding it to include more sites and use cases. As an IT professional, I believe that experimentation and exploration are essential to staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and advancements in the field.
I hope you have enjoyed this blog post, and I encourage you to subscribe to my blog for more updates and insights into my lab environment and VMware products. Thank you for reading!