I have been meaning to refresh this post for some time. My original plan was to do 1 host and run a nested environment. Due to my own stupidity, and lack of ability to have patience and read, I bought a loaded up workstation with Dual 5160 processors. This is all well and good, but the processors are so old they don’t support VT-x/EPT. So I couldn’t properly “nest” 64 bit VM’s inside 64 bit VM’s. So, what did I do? The next logical choice. I went and bought a 2nd loaded up workstation.

My hardware for the lab is as follows:

2 x Dell Precision 690 Workstations (Hosts)

1 x Custom PC (FreeNAS Storage)

1 x Cisco 2821 Router

1 x Cisco 2960-24-TT-L Switch

1 x F5 BigIP 1000

Hosts:

Each of the 2 hosts are Dell Precision 690 Workstations. They have the following hardware specs:

2 x Intel Xeon 5160

32GB of RAM

250GB HDD

2 x 4-Port Gigabit NIC’s

The storage server is a Custom built PC that I had laying around. It has the following specs:

ASUS P5Q-Deluxe Motherboard

Intel Core2Duo E6850

8GB of RAM

250GB HDD

500GB HDD

250GB SSD

1 x 4-Port Gigabit NIC

The server runs FreeNAS 9.3. The OS boots off of an 8GB thumb-drive so that all disks are available for storage.

Please check out the rest of the homelab series to check out the rest of the lab configurations.

-vTimD