After spending the last few weeks reading plenty of Blogs and reddit.com/r/homelab, I’ve decided to go with the below configuration to kick me into gear to do some serious labbing in 2014. My main aim is to complete my VCP (Attended the Install, Configure & Manage course in Q3 2013) and complete a few certifications out of the MCSA, although I’m unsure if I should jump straight to 2012 or go with 2008 yet.

I was originally going to follow Chris Wahl’s lab (http://wahlnetwork.com/my-home-lab/), but being in the UK the prices seem to be a tad expensive, spec’ing out his old white box’s came to nearly £900 for one host! I was then playing with the idea of a rack lab, as I could get some decent spec servers on eBay for cheap, but as this lab was going to be in my bedroom I was not to keen on the noise factor…

For the ESXi Cluster, I will be using 2 Dell Poweredge servers, each host has 32GB of RAM and will be running the E3-1220 V2 processor. Each server will be booting from an internal USB stick with ESXi 5.5 loaded.

I also had a spare HP ML110 which I was thinking of running as my ‘Management’ server, i.e. vCenter, AD, DNS…, but not certain yet as this is less powerful. (opinions?)

For Shared Storage I went with the 4 bay Synology 412+. Brian (http://www.vtagion.com) had good things to say about this along with lots of other reviews. I’m unsure on configuration yet, lots of playing around to be had. I purchased 4 x 3TB WD Reds, so I think RAID 10 will most likely be the best solution.

The switch I purchased on the recommendation from Tom Waller (http://www.myoutermonologue.co.uk/blog/), so we’ll see how that goes. I’ve not touched much networking in my time, but judging from what I’ve read this seems a pretty simple switch for my needs.

It has not all arrived yet, I’ll be updating once I start configuring.

Part List:

2 x Dell Poweredge T110 II E3-1220 V2 bundles with 32GB RAM / 8GB Internal USB with ESXi 5.5 / 500 GB SATA from ServersPlus @ £984 total

1 x HP ML110 G7 with the Intel G840 Dual Core Processor – I’ve had this around for a while.

4 x WD 3TB Red HDD from Amazon @ £95 each

Synology DS412+ from Micom @ £441

ZyXEL GS1910 24-port Gigabit Smart Switch from eBuyer @ £99

Random Cat6 Cables from eBay @ ~£20

TP-Link TL-WR702N Wireless N Nano Router from Amazon (To extend Wireless in my bedroom, just a bargain I noticed on hotukdeals.com) @ £12

Total = ~£1930… oops. I’m sure it will be worth it 🙂